IBM’s news feed is silent on the aspect, but Verizon VZ 38,83 +0,04 +0,10% have issued a press release on selling the Verizon cloud and managed hosting service to IBM International Business Machines Corporation 126,41 -0,56 -0,44%. It states that Verizon and IBM will be working on some strategic initiatives in cloud and networking.
After the sale of some of Verizon’s data centers to Equinix, this would be another element of the divestiture of Verizon’s data center assets. If IBM buys these, then they will likely be integrated into their IBM bluemix cloud solution (previously the SoftLayer environment).
IBM has not yet publicly verified the story at this time. Other sites reported this such as TechCrunch, TheRegister, FierceTelecom, and others. These probably (like this post) use the Verizon announcement as their source.