American Tower Corporation Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Yeah, thanks for inviting us.

Sure. Thanks, Michael. Well, as we said on the first quarter call, I'm excited because for the first time in a long time, we're seeing four different catalysts for building in the business. When I look out over the short, mid, and long term, there are a lot more demand catalysts coming in than we've seen in a while, and that excites me a lot. Our goal is to position ourselves to best capture that demand that's coming and to deliver industry-leading AFFO per share growth. The strategic priorities that were outlined for 2026, first and foremost, to focus on organic growth in the portfolio, making sure that we're capturing the growth that we're seeing from that first catalyst, which is densification from 5G, and being there for our carrier customers as they're augmenting their networks today.

The second strategic priority is really focused around expanding our margins. We have been very successful over the past few years in expanding margins. It is a key priority for us always, cost control. We have expanded margins by about 300 basis points over the last few years, and we have committed to doing another 200 to 300 over the next few years. Operating an efficient organization that still supports that carrier activity to capture as much of that business that we can is the second priority. The third is capital allocation, making sure that we are using the cash flow that comes in, that we generate in our business, in a way that creates the most long-term shareholder value.

That is whether we are investing in new assets or whether we are buying back shares or de-levering any of those options out there, making sure that we are making the right decisions at the right time.

Sure. We look at these four catalysts as self-reinforcing. The first is densification, and it is something that we always expected to happen as part of 5G. If you think about how carriers deploy their networks, the first phase of a build is a coverage build that is largely amendment driven. After that, you start focusing on capacity. You still get some amendments there, but the carriers start looking at different ways to add capacity to their networks. They will add some capacity through technology improvements, some through spectrum additions, but a lot of it comes through densification. We are already seeing that. We have seen a shift in the mix of our new business, a little bit less on the amendment side, more on the co-location side, but all underpinning a steady level of investment by the carrier.

The first catalyst is happening now, and we expect that to continue to accelerate over time. The second catalyst is a little bit farther out, 6G, but it's just around the corner. If you look at the standards bodies, they're expected to come out with standards in 2029, which means commercial deployments probably happen 2030, 2031, somewhere in that area. You'll probably see some activity before that. You'll see some proofs of concept, some early-stage networks, similar to what we did in 5G. The third, which will happen throughout this whole process, is spectrum availability. We've seen some spectrum auctions this year. We're going to see some more next year. The Big Beautiful Bill has earmarked 800 MHz of spectrum to come to market over the next several years, and that's great for towers.

Historically speaking, more spectrum equals more equipment, and we expect that to happen again with the new spectrum that's coming out. That'll come over time, and there's a cadence at which that spectrum is going to become available, but that should be a catalyst for a number of years. AI is something that is another catalyst that we don't know exactly when that's going to hit. We know that it's a small piece of network traffic today, but we also know there's an asymmetric pattern with AI that's different than the normal usage. There's more uplink required. We think that as that grows, that's going to put more stress on the network and require more investment.

When we look at all the four of those together, you've got near-term, medium-term, and long-term drivers that we see creating a great path of growth for us from now going forward.

Well, I will leave it to them to talk about their particular cadence, but what I would say is it takes a little bit of time when you buy spectrum for you to get the planning, buy the equipment, and deploy it. It doesn't happen the day after necessarily that we start seeing amendment activity, but you do see network planning starting to happen. If you're spending billions of dollars to buy spectrum, you're going to want to deploy that as soon as you can. So I would expect for all of our carriers to be aggressively laying out their plans, ordering equipment. I would expect to see that activity coming pretty quickly after the spectrum's cleared.