American Tower at TD Cowen Summit: Strategic Growth Insights

On Tuesday, 12 August 2025, American Tower Corp (NYSE:AMT) participated in the TD Cowen Communications Infrastructure Summit. The company outlined its strategic priorities, emphasizing long-term business certainty and growth, while also addressing challenges such as potential churn risks and carrier upgrade progress. The discussion highlighted both opportunities and hurdles in the evolving telecommunications landscape.

Key Takeaways

• American Tower focuses on long-term business certainty and strategic growth, including inorganic expansion.
• The company is progressing with 5G upgrades, with varying completion rates among major carriers.
• The CoreSite acquisition is expected to enhance American Tower’s edge computing capabilities.
• Future financial outlooks remain cautious, with attention on potential churn and variable business conversions.
• AI’s impact on mobile infrastructure is seen as a future demand driver.

Rich Rossi’s Journey and Leadership Changes

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U.S. Tower Division, detailed his career path at American Tower, starting in 2001 with a focus on tower divestitures. He transitioned through various roles, including General Counsel, before assuming his current position. Recent leadership changes include Steve Vondran as CEO, Bud Noel as COO, and Ruth Dowling as General Counsel, with the senior U.S. team comprising industry veterans.

U.S. Strategic Priorities and Objectives

• Focus on creating long-term business certainty and maximizing customer opportunities.
• Pursue inorganic growth through disciplined asset underwriting.
• Enhance margins across product lines like services and backup power.

Carrier Upgrade Status and Timing

• Carriers are progressing with 5G upgrades, aiming for over 95% completion.
• The coverage phase has expanded from urban to rural areas, with quality and capacity phases ongoing.
• Competitive dynamics are driving aggressive upgrade efforts among carriers.

Application Volumes and Collocation Mix

• A significant increase in collocation applications, with amendments outweighing new colocations.
• The timeline for new colocation leases is approximately six months, with amendments taking about 120 days.
• An end-to-end services program reduces the timeline for colocations to nine months.

U.S. New Leasing Guidance

• Updated leasing guidance increased to approximately $160 million.
• Organic growth is projected at roughly 4.3%, subject to timing of commencements.

Future Outlook for 2026

• Specific details for 2026 are not yet available, but the 2023-2027 U.S. organic growth guide is maintained.
• Potential churn is being monitored, with guidance at 1% to 2%.

Industry Momentum and Capital Allocation

• Activity is expected to pick up, potentially offsetting step downs in use fees.
• No indications of decreased tower activity despite diversified spending by customers.

AI Impact on Mobile Infrastructure

• AI is seen as a future demand driver, with potential positive impacts on network activity.
• More data traffic could catalyze mobile investment.

Cost Initiatives

• Targeting 80 basis points in savings for the year through synergies and process integration.
• Global operations platform and system infrastructure improvements are key contributors.

Far Edge and CoreSite Acquisition

• Potential for modular data centers at tower sites, focusing on Tier 2 clients.
• CoreSite acquisition aims to enhance edge computing capabilities, aligning with strategic vision.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript provided below.

Full transcript - TD Cowen Communications Infrastructure Summit:

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. All right. Perfect. Good morning everyone and welcome to TD Cowen’s eleventh Annual Communications Infrastructure Summit. My name is Michael Elias and I am the CommInfo analyst here at TD Cowen.

For this session, we’re joined by American Tower. And from American Tower, we have their EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, Rich Rossi. This session is structured as a fireside chat.

I’ve said this in other sessions. I promise you I will try and open it up for questions at the end. But like I said, I do get excited. All right. So with that, Rich, thank you so much for being here.

Really appreciate it.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Thanks, Mike. Great to be here.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Now, we’re just talking about this before we got started. You started in 2001 at American Tower. Yes. That is a company veteran, if I’ve heard one. Your perspective, like, can you give us an overview of your time at American Tower and a bit of your path to your current seat?

I think that would be helpful as we set up this conversation.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yeah, sure. So back in 2001 was my first job out of law school. I started as a contractor at American Tower. Ironically enough, I’m tasked today with growing The U. S.

Business. At that time, I was working on tower divestitures. We had this brilliant idea that if you had a couple of towers in the same one or two mile radius, that was probably one or two too many. So at that time, we were focused on reducing operating expenses and property taxes, things like that. So we divested some towers over my first couple of years with AMT.

And then I moved out into our U. S. Operations, had a series of roles that were either operational or legal in nature, and spent a lot of time working on our customer agreements. So the major customer MLAs, probably the last fifteen years. Did some M and A work and became the General Counsel of The U.

S. In 2018. And then took the President’s role beginning of this year. So it’s been a really interesting journey.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Congratulations to you. And now, since you’ve stepped into that role, and we’re about halfway through the year, I’m curious, can you talk about your key learnings since stepping into that President role? And as part of that, the strategic priorities and objectives for you in The U. S?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yeah. So the interesting dynamic we have right now is Steve, our CEO, stepped into the role early in ’twenty four. Bud Noel became our COO at the same time I took this role. Ruth Dowling is fairly fresh in the general counsel role. So we’ve had total leadership change at American Tower and that all internal folks moving into those roles, and that’s created another layer of opportunity for folks.

So our senior US team is a lot of people who are just moving into their roles. You know, I think the longest tenure is about eighteen months. So we have a team of industry veterans, all probably around twenty years on average of experience, but new to those roles. So one of the biggest learnings has been how do we keep this train moving at full speed, taking all the energy and excitement that these folks are bringing, but channeling it into driving the right results. In terms of The U.

S. Focus, what I’d say is our focus at all times is creating the greatest amount of durable long term certainty for the business. So that’s a key, but we’re trying to do it in a couple of ways. One, maximizing the opportunities when we’re working with our customers to make sure that we provide our investors with results that are going make us a choice that’s the best one out of our sector. But you also have to make agreements with customers that create value for them.

So while we’re trying to make sure that we drive as much revenue as we can, we know customers have options. So making sure that we provide them with long term value as well is really important. We’re looking at opportunities to grow inorganically, so making sure that our underwriting is disciplined and that we are finding assets that meet our criteria and that help provide long term growth. Those are all key. And then the last thing I would add is, we’re really taking a product management focus now more so than we have in the past.

And so we’re looking at everything, whether it’s our services business, backup power program, the way we run our rooftops, trying to expand margin on all these different product lines to help drive those top line results.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit because that’s been a topic that’s come up on the earnings call. But I want to in The U. S. Specifically, I want to focus on the commentary that we’ve heard about the big three in terms of where they stand in their upgrades, right?

I think on the 2Q earnings call, it was that the goal is so that their goal is to get to over 95%. One of them is at 85% today, another at 70% and the last one is around 50%. When you’re having your conversations with the carriers, what are you hearing from them in terms of, let’s say, timing of their upgrades? And how does that compare to the conversation and the narrative when you were sitting down last year?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yep. So what I’d say is without getting into specifics with the individual customers, I think that what we’re seeing with five gs in particular is it’s playing out the way that we thought it was going to back in 2019, 2020 when things started to get underway. And that’s because we had a good track record with both four gs and three gs watching those processes unfold. And so when we sort of take that vision and match it up to what we’re hearing from customers, it’s very consistent. The way that we view the generational technologies is they hit three different phases.

First phase, think of as your coverage phase, and that’s starting at the urban center and pushing the network out to the outer edges, to rural areas. Then you have that phase that I’ve heard referred to as halftime pause. We call it a quality phase.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Why don’t you have time pause? Yeah, exactly. So yeah,

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: there you go. There’s two in one. But we look at that as the phase where the operators take a look at where they are from a coverage perspective. They’re also looking at where the demand is on the network, and that rolls into that third phase, which is capacity. And in capacity, you may see them go back and revisit some of the sites that were touched initially in the coverage phase.

You may see some densification activity with new colocations to provide a full on new cell site, whether it’s colocation or a build to suit, to fill in an area where demand, you know, there’s more traffic on a site than upgrading with more equipment would be able to accommodate. So I think we’re seeing it play out as we thought it would a year ago and as we thought it would five years ago, which is great because it is nice to see the trajectory of that story continue to go in the direction that we’re imagining it would.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: When I hear of so in data center land as an example, You have one buyer who’s super active and then another one falls behind because whatever situation it may be. But usually what you see is you see like the spring effect where the person who’s behind is like, oh, we need to catch up and they just go on a massive procurement spree. When I hear about the 50, the one that’s at 50% without naming any names, my gut is to say, okay, well they need to play catch up, right? And as a result we could see an acceleration there. Does the same dynamic that applies in data center land with the hyperscalers apply to the carriers where you can see that, hey, we need to catch up to our peers?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yeah, I think there are definitely some similarity to what you just described. One of the great things about being an infrastructure for wireless is the carriers over the last twenty years have consistently shown that they’re going to compete to differentiate on quality of service. So to the extent that somebody is behind in whatever metrics you may be looking at, at that time, they will tend to try to work really aggressively to try to catch up. So I think when you talk about somebody who is behind, we look at that as more of a when, not an if situation. And so timing can be variable in some of these relationships.

The carriers are taking different paths to get to five gs. All sort of the same destination, but their journeys have been different through each of the technology generations. But in this case, yeah, their pace may be different, but we think the results can be the same.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. And then also, you’ve been highlighting the increase in the application volumes, right? And as part of that, you’re highlighting the increases on the collocation side. I’m curious like as you think of the relative mix between the two, how has that evolved? I know collos have increased, but just kind of like trying to see the chart in my head if you will.

And then the second question becomes, as you think about the book to bill or the timeline between when it’s signed to ultimately when it commences, what is that how has that changed, if at all?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: So the mix of sort of amendments or augmentations versus colocation still weighs heavily on our portfolio towards amendments. If you just think of the size, 43,000 U. S. Assets and then the relationships with our customers, over 10,000 leases, sometimes over 20,000 leases with particular customers, there are a lot of sites for them to touch when they do these upgrades. So we’re seeing a lot of amendment activity and have been for the last five years.

You mentioned the increase, the 200% increase in collocation. So that’s exciting. It’s still a smallish number compared to the overall float of applications that we have coming through, but it’s nice to see that pick up. I think it helps with some of the densification story that we have forecasted and that we’re seeing play out right now. From a sort of signing book to bill type timeline, I think with The carriers have done a great job over the last decade of getting much more into a mindset of just in time deployment.

Back in my earlier days, twenty years ago, you would see new colocations being signed up that weren’t going to be installed for two or three years. And that’s changed a lot. So I think what you see now is with a new colocation lease, it may take six months from when the application is received to when it’s actually signed, whether it’s permitting, legal review, whatever it may be, engineering review. It takes a little bit of time. With amendments, it’s a little bit shorter.

It may be something more like one hundred and twenty days. But those processes live within a larger process, which goes all the way from scoping of the site to construction. So one of the things that we do with our services program is we have AZP, which is the front end permitting. We have construction on the back end. And then we have an end to end offering, which does the whole thing from scoping to construction.

And we found that, while it usually takes about twelve months to do that, as a stand alone, when we do end to end, it’s more like nine months on a colocation. So we’re able to shave off some valuable time. So we’re seeing things move quickly with some customers, but then sort of to your prior question, with some others, we are seeing a bit of a lag in that timeline. So it’s not gospel per se, but those are more indicative in terms of what the timelines typically are.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Got it. One of the things that I think through is like the conversion of pipeline, and I’m trying to find the right way to say it because I always get I get tripped up sometimes with the tower terminology. As I think about it, you said when the application is received then it goes through the legal review and so on and then an application is signed, right? That what percentage of what you receive actually gets converted into something that’s signed that ultimately does become revenue generating? Just trying to get a sense for that percentage.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Sure. It’s tough to quantify that with a percentage in part because of some of the comprehensive or holistic arrangements that we have. So those arrangements, I should mention, they help on the speed question that we just had. You know, the book to bill, those contracts provide an expedited experience because you take out a lot of that middle stuff that happens in that six months when a contract is floating around. That’s more like a thirty days process from application to what you would call a signed amendment.

In some of those contracts, they contemplate a steady flow of revenue over multiple years. And so as a result of that, the applications that come in behind it don’t have revenue specifically attached to them, but they track back to a bigger arrangement where the revenue has sort of been accounted for as part of an overarching relationship. So we have a mix of things that come in that are a la carte that probably has a higher percentage of things that are going to have revenue attached to them. But the applications that coincide with one of those holistic contracts, they’re less likely to have revenue because it’s already been baked in.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: It’s been baked, yeah. No, that makes sense. One of the questions I would ask is we’re talking about these holistic agreements. I think there is one customer who you’ve talked about on the call without naming specific names that they you’re not on a holistic agreement with them. I’m curious, how would you just generally describe the opportunity to have holistic agreements with all of your big carriers in The U.

S. In the near to medium term? Yeah. I mean,

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: if you we’ve only had a couple of years. It’s probably ’twenty one and ’twenty two where we had all of the majors on those type of contracts. To your earlier question about the way that the timing coincides between the different customers build out, we never really were able to find in four gs and three gs the opportunities where the overlap was such that you would have those contracts in place because somebody was lagging behind or somebody was far out ahead. So we did have an early five gs. You had that pent up demand for mid band deployment where everyone was doing the same thing.

So I think we had that brief window of time. It’s something that we’re open to, but also something we’re comfortable having some customers in those structures, some being a la carte, or all being a la carte. Because ultimately, those agreements, they provide that faster experience and some back office efficiency for us. So quicker deployment for the customer, less manual touches for our business. But it really adds up to sort of the same opportunity.

I think with the comprehensive contracts, you have a little more ability to forecast when things are going to hit versus the a la carte model where there might be more variability in timing. So we’re comfortable with either, but always open to those big long term committed contracts as well.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Perfect. I do want to ask about your U. S. New leasing guidance, which you gave an update for on the call. So you took it to roughly $160,000,000 versus the 105,000,000 to $170,000,000 prior.

And you gave the reasons in terms of commencements and all that. Now that you’re 70,000,000 you’ve done $77,000,000 through the first half of the year, I mean, in order to get there, it needs to take a step up. But what I thought was interesting is that almost like similar to the beginning of the year or unlike the beginning of the year, you didn’t provide like a organic growth range. Before it was greater than 4.3% or greater than or equal to 4.3%. Now it’s roughly 4.3%, which makes me think, like have you guys fully derisked the guidance?

Feel comfortable that this is where we come in. Or is there still some execution risk around that?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: I would sleep better if we had derisked that. So there’s still we still have to perform. So there’s still, right, it’s about 4.3, could be a little less, could be a little more. It really depends on the conversions on some of that variable a la carte business. So that number derived from just looking at what’s in our pipeline using our historical perspective to figure out what the opportunities to convert those into billing would be.

So The commencement piece. The commencing, actually commencing it, not just getting it signed So, yeah, that for us seems to be the right place that we think we’re going to land for end of the year, but it really is subject to some of the things we talked about that when they land is going to dictate what the exact number is going to be.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Sure. Now I’m going to try and phrase this in the best way possible. So as we think about the business and we’re moving towards our 4Q exit, let’s say this activity comes through in the commencement right? What I’m curious about is, if you were taking a historical purview looking at the tower industry, what would you say is implied for 2026, if at all, based on the jump off point at the end of the year? I’m just trying to calibrate and make sure that we’re kind of like dialed in and we’re not getting too far over our skis in terms of getting excited about the activity that’s out there.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yes. So I mean, it’s only August, so too early to really nail down what ’twenty six is going to look like. We’ve given a long term guide that was the ’twenty three to ’twenty seven U. S. Organic guide, right?

And we haven’t changed that, So that could kind of give you an idea of what we’re thinking. I think some of the larger contracts that we have that have been in place 2020, ’twenty one, ’twenty two, you have some contracted step downs in terms of the commitments on those. So what that means is the our budget’s going to have a lot of the a la carte pay by the drink type business coming through. So again, it doesn’t mean less. It’s just a timing thing.

So as you look at ’twenty six, what we’re trying to figure out between now here in August and the end of the year before we do the guide in January, early February would be just what are we going to commit to on those commencements for that more variable pipeline. So it gives us a couple of months to look at that, nail it down. And then also, right, we just the ink is still wet on S. Cellular deal.

Yeah. We have some renewals coming up on The U. S. Cellular side in ’twenty six, so better understanding what’s going to happen, what their plans are for that network. We haven’t had conversations about that.

So some of the variable commencement and then thinking about whether there is any risk on churn on that side. And any risk we have there, we’ve given the 1% to 2% guidance on churn. And we’ve been very much in the low end of that. So, the question is just it wouldn’t be outside of that. Is it somewhere in the midpoint in there?

So just trying to figure out the specificity on that before we give any real clarity on ’26.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. Would it be fair to say because I appreciate the step down in what we’d call the use fees, right? Is that Yes,

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: that’s right.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: So I appreciate that dynamic, but I would think that to the extent that you’re seeing a step down there, well, there’s going to have to be something else that’s going to have to that would have to come and offset that. And what I’m just generally curious about is every quarter we get on the call and we hear more about, hey, activity is picking up, right? Do you just broadly think that the momentum is there for the overall industry, right, that we could be offsetting any potential step downs that some tower companies could have as a result of changes in the use fees. Sure. And it’s not an American Tower specific question that you guys have.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: I know. The industry, yeah. I think with those use fees, in some cases they’re comprehensive where it covers everything that you do together. In some cases, it’s only limited to certain activities. So we always try to leave ourselves some opportunity outside of that.

So a use fee step down doesn’t mean that the opportunity steps down as well. It just means that what was committed from that particular customer rolls off, and they may have options to spend in different ways. But from where we have visibility, we still think that there is a lot of opportunity coming through for ’twenty six, ’twenty seven, right, so to keep consistent with that guide. And it may be a little different than the activity we’ve seen now when you go from that coverage phase, it’s more amendments to that capacity phase where you start seeing some more colocation. We mentioned the pickup in colocation So we think that there are definitely some indicators out there that show that there’s going to be a mix of sources from where it comes from.

But, yeah, I wouldn’t read into the step down. Those step downs are set when the contracts were signed five years ago, four years ago. So that’s kind of looking at a crystal ball and trying to figure out where the activity may be. And then what we look at today is where it actually is. So that informs our longer term look.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: You know, one of the things that I’ve thought about is, hey, if we rewind the clock to I want to say it was when bonus depreciation started to come out for the carriers. This is with the Jobs Act and all that stuff, right? It had a negative impact on their financials. And then now you obviously saw the one big beautiful bill. I would think that stands to benefit them.

Though the question that we get from investors is, how has now with this incremental flexibility, how have their investment decisions changed? Or how have their capital allocation priorities changed? Now, you initially think, okay, this is probably good for the towers. But I’m curious in your conversations, let’s say, are you getting any sense in terms of a shift in where their focus is going as a function of, hey, maybe we have some more capital to play with?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yeah, we still feel really good about where the spend is relative to towers. Our customers have always had diversified spend, right? When you went into five gs, I’d say around 2017, 2018 timeframe, there was a big fiber aggregation initiative and some of the carriers were out there spending a ton on fiber, also buying a lot of high band frequency licenses. And I remember at that time the question was, hey, what does this mean for towers, right? Is it going to is five gs going to look different than four and three?

And I think that as you saw it play out, we saw five gs across high, mid and low band spectrum. And we’ve seen it was $35,000,000,000 I think is the aggregate spend per year right now that we’re seeing from the carriers compared to the 30,000,000,000 in four gs. So it’s an increased spend. We’re not seeing anything that would indicate that the activity levels are different on tower. So we always expect that our customers have their hands in a lot of different pools trying to figure out what’s going be best for their overall business, But we don’t see that as a detractor for how they’re focusing on tower.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. And then one other thing, historically, I have looked at the services business as the leading indicator to activity on the leasing front, essentially. I hear some nuance on the calls about the type of business that you’re getting within services. Is it fair to say that based on what we’re seeing within services, hey, this sets up well for the leasing picture? Or is there something that you’d caution me on?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: I would say to interpret the services revenues, the difference in the type of service matters. AZP, the acquisition zoning and permitting happens at the front end of the process. And that generally is a leasing indicator, right? So we take a look at our services setups, and we say that is going be an indicator of what the application incoming application pipeline from those customers will look like. When you do construction, you’re doing construction on the same sites that you’ve done AZP on.

So it doesn’t the construction is not necessarily a leader of future leasing activity. It really is just sort of the finality of that project. It’s taking it to the final stages. So there’s a portion of the services business that, yes, is an indicator. And there’s another portion that is sort of detached from the new business, that would be the construction side.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: So there’s a yes and a no in there. But I think on the construction side, it’s accretive, right? So we think it’s a very good business. It’s a great ancillary offering. It helps from a differentiation standpoint.

And it just creates a little bit of stickiness as well.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: That answer says to me more no than yes. That’s why I interpret it back on.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: No. Think what so let me back up then to be more specific. So where you saw our results this past quarter where we had the big bump, a lot of that was construction. So that the construction revenue that you see right now doesn’t mean that the next quarter has a ton of new applications coming in. That’s just the application data that we gave, which is the six months the past six, right?

Done it. Month over month. So what I’d say is anything that’s on the sort of the AZP side is going to drive more application activity. The construction side, less so. Okay.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: And then I do want to talk, you already brought it up in this conversation, you brought up US cellular, right? You know, is, I think on the call the comment, the commentary was that it’s 0.5 of your global property revenue. And then I think it’s greater than or less or greater than 1%.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Right around 1%.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: So around 1%.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yes.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: You know, is there an internal expectation of the size or, you know, any potential impact from U. S. Cellular? Because I think the commentary was that you haven’t had the conversations with them yet. But I’m sure you can take a look at the map and see maybe where there’s some overlap.

So curious if you have any thoughts there.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yeah. Well, we think that so a lot of that has to do with when the leases come up for renewal, right? That will drive a lot of decision making around maybe what’s kept or what’s kept for the near term versus the long term. And I think I mentioned that in 2026 we have tranche of renewals that are coming up. That’s something that we’ll take a look at and factor that in when we give our guide.

I think I mentioned that we’ve been in that lower end of the one to 2% So range on if it means that we tick up a little bit within that range, that’s probably the most that we would worry about there. Okay. But as I mentioned, ’26 was a tranche. There was a tranche in ’25. And then there’s a smattering of leases that we acquired over time.

So I think the 25s are probably pretty locked in. Now we’re really looking at ’26.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Now as part of that, one of the things that when I think back to Sprint, T Mobile with their merger, then the tail of that churn, it didn’t all come out like immediately. Came out over time. Do you think that that’s something that we could reasonably see here in this situation to a point where we don’t even feel it, it just kind of dribbles out. Or with smaller, let’s say, smaller deals for a carrier that they would just take it, drive the cost efficiencies kind of as soon as they can. What does depend on really just the renewal schedule?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: It’s all of those things, right? And it depends on sort of what the model was for the acquiring carrier no matter what the circumstance is. So, yes, mean, a much smaller scale than the Sprint T Mobile, So, it’s not as meaningful. So, I’m not sure. But, I mean, we have conversations with all our customers all the time.

So, if there’s an opportunity to do something out there that drives value for a customer and drives it for us, then we’re game to looking at structuring it in that way.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. I do want to talk a little bit about EchoStar. Yes. So we recently saw the kind of the dynamic with the FCC. I think on the call you highlighted that’s around 2% of global revenues.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: 4% for The U. S, yes.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: And slightly over 4%, I think, was the commentary for The U. S. How do you think about the relationship there long term? Obviously, I appreciate I’m asking about something specific, I’m just curious how you think about it given the headlines.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yes. I mean, our guide only includes the contracted minimums from our transactions, so we’re not building in upside into our estimates. As far as our relationship with Boost goes, they’re a customer in good standing. We’ve enjoyed working with them and supporting them. Nothing but a positive experience so far.

Obviously, there’s a lot of external stuff happening with their business that, you know, we’re on the sidelines like everybody else just trying to assess what the impact may be for us. But for the moment, you know, no concerns with our relationship with them in terms of where we are today.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. So to that point, you’ve embedded just the minimums. But I also think about, what I think about is, there’s a shot clock, right? And as part of that, you need to make investments in network. Would it to the extent that we saw them increase their activity, right?

And this is not a question about them. This is more of an American Tower specific question. To the extent that you saw upside to the minimums, could it be a needle mover for growth like is a small incremental? Is it something that could be meaningful? I’m just curious how you frame up that relative upside case with them.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: So for upside, I mean, it really is dependent upon this with any customer, the scale of the build, right? So based on our portfolio, location of our assets and the relationship I think we’ve built with some of these customers who are building up more aggressively, then we would hope that we’d be at the table and an active participant in that. But I mean, it really just depends on how big is the next phase.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. I want to talk to you I want to shift gears a little bit. I want to talk about AI because we’ve So been talking about AI a lot of course, let’s do the same with Tara’s. For me, I think about how I interact with it in my personal life and it drives out bits and bytes, mostly text, right? I’m curious how you think about, given your time in the industry, how you think about AI impacting demand for mobile infrastructure?

One of the, I think Mark Antti on their earnings call said, don’t sleep on mobile infrastructure, right? Making the point that, yes, there will be a benefit. I’m curious how you see that translating into demand for American Tower.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yes. I think we view it as demand that is to come, right? It’s not upon us So just looking in the crystal ball and figuring out exactly when that is, is tricky. But if you go back to 2019 timeframe going into five gs, there was a lot of talk about low latency applications and the need to machine to machine communication, autonomous vehicles, all those things. And I think where we sit today, the biggest successes in five gs have been the quality and speed of network, right, and then fixed wireless.

And so I think that some of those cases, the low latency applications have remained elusive, and I think AI brings a lot of that to the forefront. So I think that you are starting to see the ripening of some of those use cases, whether it’s things like autonomous vehicles or industrial machine learning, things like that. So I know minimally hearing a bit from some of our customers, the AI searches that are run on your phone now that we all take for granted, right? That drives more consumption than a traditional search, right? So when you take those things and you multiply the impact from multiple users in a search ring of the site, it puts more demand on that particular installation.

So we look at that as something that can drive activity for us. How much of it? Not sure at this point, but it really can only be a positive for us.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Would you think, because this is one of the things I’ve been struggling with is I heard a stat that was ChatGPT will output more text in this year than all of humanity created and going back to the Gutenberg press. Now what I think through is like, okay, we iterate this as a function of time, it is more text just moving through and we know text is low bit intensity or relative to video. I’m curious, do we really need to see a world in which there’s video, like video that’s created using AI that’s moving across the network that really is what would drive incremental bits and that require it? Do you think we could, there’s a world in which we can just see more text moving through the system and that would drive enough upside to traffic to really be a catalyst for mobile investment?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: I think it’s a little bit of both, right? I think we always envision the video uplink piece as being something that drives a lot of data consumption. So to the extent that you are using AI to drive more video applications, that is something that would, yeah, would definitely require more infrastructure to support.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. You know, as, I’m curious, when I’m at, I think you were at ConnectX, if I’m not mistaken. You go to the panels and we talk about six And we’re not quite through five gs yet. I’m curious, how do you think about then I know it’s a ways out, but how do you think about the next upgrade cycle? And kind of based on the workloads and applications that you’re seeing out there, what that would need to be oriented towards.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Yeah. Well, so one of the big variables, I think, for six gs is the spectrum that’s going to be used for it, right? We know big beautiful bill, 800 megahertz spectrum, 100 is going to be contiguous mid band. So we know how that looks from a deployment and equipment standpoint. But to the extent that you have higher band frequencies, right, the physics on that would indicate that you would need sites clustered more closely together.

It could be a densification opportunity. It could be different types of equipment. So I think the identification of those frequency bands will dictate a lot of what those deployments look like. So still, you know, yet to be seen exactly what it will be. But we think from a cyclicality standpoint, the coverage, quality, capacity is going to continue to play out in that way.

Okay.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: So I do switch want gears a little bit, and I do want to talk about the cost initiatives that you’ve been working I hear 80 basis points, I believe, is one of the targets for the year in terms of savings. As you look at the opportunity set, mean, do you see the most latent opportunity on the cost saving side? Yeah.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: I think the global operations platform is going to be major contributor to the cost savings. I think Steve and Rod have been very upfront with that. And so, we’ve run our businesses locally throughout the globe in a way that we think that they’re all very high quality businesses, but the synergies haven’t always been there. So now to hear from some of the folks who I’ve worked with in The U. S.

For years who are now doing global operational roles, they come back and say, Oh, there’s such an opportunity to do something with this platform or this process, and we can cut it across three different continents, right? So I think that we’re going to see synergy in the way that we have the system infrastructure, some of our field practices, things like flying drones, developing the digital twin. Like these are processes that we can migrate from one region to another and we can do so at a better cost than we would be doing on a standalone basis.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: One of the things that I also think about is, and this is going to shift gears a little bit, but I’ll tie back into the tower, is as I think of the original idea for doing the CoreSite acquisition, right? You own the metro edge or you own the interconnection facility at the metro edge. You have a distributed footprint. You could put modular data centers kind of at the base station of these tower sites and you could own out to the far edge, right? Now, one of the themes we’re talking about today is for the proliferation of AI and pushing out to the edge.

But I’m curious from your perspective, how has that opportunity set played out particularly around the far edge? And to the extent that we see a meaningful increase in demand at the far edge, could that actually be something that’s margin accretive to your tower business?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: We think so. And the way that we’ve seen it play out so far, you may have seen we launched our first facility in Raleigh, North for edge. And what we’re seeing right now, we were just talking about this earlier today, is we’re seeing right now a lot of people who are in Tier two who need data center space. And they’re showing up at the edge location saying, hey, let me in, right? And so there’s an opportunity there to fill the space, which is great, but we’re also looking for people who are going to be strategic mobile edge type operators who are going to attract that ecosystem of other customers that help sort of fulfill that vision.

So I think there’s it’s still going to take time. And if you listen to the operators, they’re talking about edge and some of it’s happening now, but they’re also talking about it as a multiyear plan. So I think we’re still a couple of years away from when we’re going to see the proliferation where you see a lot of it. But we’re positioning ourselves between Raleigh and some of the other locations that we’re developing right now to be ready for it, right, to help create that ecosystem and not just wait for it to come knocking on our door. You know from data centers, they’re not short lead time So projects, you have to be planning and shovel ready if you want to be competitive.

And so we do think that some of that, the large learning models and inferencing moving out to the edge and the second tier markets is a great matchup for our portfolio with the 40,000 plus sites in The U. S. So, we’re really interested in maximizing the locations, not just for tower, but for whatever other uses there can be.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: You know what’s interesting is, I’m going to rewind a bit, maybe date myself a little bit. In June 2021, we’re having a conversation with the American Tower team and the idea was presented of being the one stop shop, You have a globally distributed footprint. You can be the easy button for a hyperscaler to deploy at the edge, right? Then you went and acquired CoreSite. But from my perspective, like if you were truly going to be the one stop shop, CoreSite is step one along a journey of acquiring interconnection facilities in a bunch of markets around the globe.

So as we think about the original proposition that was presented before the CoreSet acquisition, I’m curious, how has that evolved? And if you still want to play in that space, wouldn’t that suggest that there is much more that needs to be done in scaling up the data center footprint in order for you to drive that interplay?

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: Well, what I will say that the pre CoreSite versus the post CoreSite is the legitimacy of our capabilities to operate these. Yeah. Right? And it’s we had good smart people who had data center backgrounds who were developing these sites. But with Coresight, you bring the data center fabric and you bring the know how that, you know, it’s that plus the 40,000 sites when you combine that, you have a really nice combination.

So if we were trying to build it organically out of Tower only, the learnings would take far longer. Oh, yeah. Right? And so it is really, CoreSite has helped to speed everything up and the teams work really well together in terms of trying to define how Edge fits in this larger ecosystem. So I think we’re leveraging it very well right now.

Michael Elias, CommInfo Analyst, TD Cowen: Okay. All right. Well, I will leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah.

Really, really appreciate it.

Rich Rossi, EVP and President of the U. S. Tower Division, American Tower: I appreciate the time. Awesome. Thank you, man.

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