Amentum cites data centers, networks as core to its infrastructure strategy
Gettyimages.com / Busakorn Pongparnit
By
Ross Wilkers
In talking with Wall Street, Amentum's CEO and chief operating officer detailed what the company does today in digital infrastructure and how work with commercial clients such as telcos can apply in government.
Artificial intelligence and data centers are mainstream topics in today’s landscape that are intertwined as advances in both are also raising demand for compute, power and connectivity resources.
Global mobile data traffic only continues to grow and IT is increasingly being pushed out into edge environments, or away from centralized environments like clouds and data centers.
During Amentum’s fiscal third quarter earnings call with investors Wednesday, executives shared some of the company’s thinking on the digital and physical aspects of infrastructure that make technologies work.
CEO John Heller said this part of Amentum’s business, which it calls “critical digital infrastructure (see slides 6-7 of this investor deck,” includes work with the hyperscale cloud providers to retrofit data centers for AI workloads that are adding stress onto the electrical grid.
Amentum also collaborates with major telecommunications companies on efforts to engineer, design and deploy wireless and fiber infrastructure for national 5G networks. Cybersecurity and network defense are part of the equation too, Heller added.
Of course, investors want to know where a company wants to go next with its portfolio after providing the details of what is in there today.
Steve Arnette, Amentum’s chief operating officer, told analysts the company is “beginning to work with 6G” amid today’s work on 4G and 5G networks.
“It's really helping some of the major telcos to be able to match capacity to demand and… being able to diagnose where additional capacity is needed to engineer, and even to deploy, that capacity to enable a stable system performance and reaction to dynamic demand,” Arnette said. “We have these geographically distributed teams that are there ready to be able to design, integrate and deploy these solutions. We can shift that capacity to work with data centers and these other kinds of types of projects. So the telecom is a little bit of a foundational piece, and now we're growing that business into other areas.”
As Heller highlighted, businesses and consumers of AI tools are the ones driving demand of data traffic and that in turn is pressuring the telos to expand their infrastructure.
Hyperscalers are also under pressure to build out more data centers to meet that capacity demand for network access and AI functionality.
Government and commercial enterprises alike are dealing with these trends and the risk exposures associated with them, such as cyber and other issues that require responses as they come up.
“For us it's not expanding our capability, it's just leveraging strong capability that we've had for decades because you have this unbelievable demand being created by AI,” Heller said.
Amentum’s government customer collective has long had to grapple with issues around data security and cybersecurity. Often times, it’s the agencies that take the lead on innovation efforts in cyber because of the nature of their missions.
On the other hand, 5G and other advances in communications have been led by commercial market players like the telcos. This is where the concept of dual-use technology comes in, where hardware and software can be used in both civilian and defense environments.
Arnette said that the Missile Defense Agency and Space Force are examples of agencies seeking to further innovate their communications networks, from which they want to “take latency out of the system.”
“There's so much acceleration in activity in the government customer space trying to better utilize 5G and some of the, elaborate capabilities of 5G and government missions, which heretofore has been primarily a commercial venture,” Arnette said. “We're very much taking advantage of that dual use.
“Some of those exact expertise areas will absolutely cross over into future commercial applications as you really build out this data center core, connect and edge,” Arnette added.
Fiscal second quarter revenue of $3.5 billion was flat over the prior year period, while profit of $275 million represented a 3% year-over-year increase in adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization).
Amentum held to its fiscal year 2026 guidance of revenue in the range of $13.95 billion-to-$14.3 billion on adjusted EBITDA of $1.1 billion-to-$1.14 billion,