But profitable to IBM, and counts as OpEx not CapEx for accounting. A bit like cloud. But if you want they will ship it to you, or just setup a VPN or even a more dedicated connection (say, MPLS) to one of their datacenters. Or even sell it to you cloud style, running on LPAR/zVM.

They also tend to send you a more filled out mainframe (more CPU, more memory) so you can be flexible with utilization or "pay on demand" for more occassionally.