American Tower Corporation 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you, and good morning.

Welcome to our third quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are Steve Vondran, our President and CEO, and Rod Smith, our Executive Vice President, CFO, and Treasurer. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to our Safe Harbor statement. It says that some of our comments today may be forward-looking. As such, they are subject to risks and uncertainties described in American Tower SEC filings, and results may differ materially. Additional information is available on our investor relations website. I'll now turn the call over to Steve.

Steve? Thanks, Spencer. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining today's call.

We delivered another solid quarter with our global tower leasing business performing consistently with expectations and our data center business continuing to outperform. The momentum we're seeing across the company, combined with the benefit of our share repurchase activity, gives us confidence to raise our full-year outlook for the third time this year. Our third-quarter performance reinforces the durability of our business model and the quality of the portfolio we've built. We're operating from a position of strength, supported by resilient tower cash flows, a differentiated and rapidly growing data center platform, a healthy balance sheet, and a more focused portfolio following the actions we've taken over the past several years. As we enter the final quarter of the year, our strategic priorities remain unchanged, driving durable revenue growth, enhancing operational efficiency, and allocating capital with discipline.

Starting with revenue growth, our tower business remains on track to deliver approximately 4% organic tenant billings growth excluding one-time DISH-related impacts. At the same time, CoreSite's continued outperformance is enabling us to raise our outlook for data center revenue growth to 16%, up from our expectation of 15% last quarter and 13% at the start of the year. The long-term outlook for wireless infrastructure remains very favorable. Last quarter, I discussed four major catalysts that we believe can create overlapping investment cycles and support network demand well into the next decade. The evidence supporting each of those catalysts continues to strengthen. The first catalyst is the capacity phase of 5G. Early deployments were primarily focused on coverage. The next phase will increasingly be about adding capacity, improving performance, and densifying networks as traffic continues to grow.

That requires carriers to add equipment to existing sites and increase cell site density where demand is greatest, and we're already beginning to see that activity emerge. Recent industry data reinforces the scale of that opportunity. CTIA reported that Americans consumed a record 159 trillion megabytes of wireless data in 2025, an increase of more than 20% year-over-year, and projects total wireless demand will grow fourfold by 2032. These trends point to sustained investment simply to keep pace with growing consumer and enterprise demand. The second catalyst is a new spectrum deployment cycle. Approximately 800 MHz of additional mobile spectrum is expected to become available over the coming years, beginning with upper C-band in 2027 and potentially followed by additional deployments across bands such as 2.7 GHz, 4 GHz, and 7 GHz.

Historically, new spectrum deployments have led to elevated amendment activity and equipment upgrades, and we expect the next cycle to do the same. The third catalyst is the transition to 6G. While commercial deployment is still ahead of us, the industry is increasingly aligned around network architectures that will be more intelligent, more distributed, and more reliant on Edge computing. Those characteristics point to increased equipment requirements, greater network density, and expanding role for communications infrastructure. The fourth catalyst is AI, which we believe has the potential to significantly reshape wireless network demand. CTIA expects AI traffic to grow three times faster than traditional wireless traffic and account for nearly one-third of broadband traffic by 2034. Importantly, AI is not simply creating more traffic.

AI-powered devices, agents, connected vehicles, robotics, and real-time applications are expected to create traffic that's more persistent, more interactive, and increasingly uplink-intensive. Supporting these use cases will require additional spectrum, network capacity, lower latency, and greater density. In our view, AI has the potential to extend and deepen the wireless investment cycle beyond what's embedded in traditional traffic forecasts today. Taken together, these catalysts reinforce one another. The capacity phase of 5G, future spectrum deployments, the transition to 6G, and AI-driven traffic growth all point to a future requiring more capacity, greater density, and increasingly sophisticated digital infrastructure. We believe that American Tower is uniquely positioned to support that evolution. We're also seeing growing interest from satellite providers seeking to participate more directly in the U.S. wireless market. We view satellite and terrestrial wireless infrastructure as complementary technologies.

Satellite can extend coverage and support specific use cases, but delivering broad, reliable, and high-capacity wireless service continues to require terrestrial infrastructure. Any provider seeking to compete at scale in the U.S. will ultimately require a terrestrial network layer that includes towers, fiber, backhaul, power, and Edge interconnection. For American Tower, the emergence of additional participants represents an incremental opportunity. Our nationwide footprint and neutral host operating model allow both existing and emerging providers to deploy quickly, efficiently, and at scale. Many of these same secular trends continue to drive strong performance at CoreSite. CoreSite delivered another strong quarter, with customer demand and pricing both exceeding our expectations. Momentum remained broad-based across cloud, network, enterprise, and AI customers, and demand has continued to accelerate into the fourth quarter. As organizations deploy larger and more sophisticated AI workloads, they require greater connectivity between clouds, networks, compute environments, and enterprise applications.

This is driving increased demand for highly connected campuses and contributing to continued growth in our interconnection business. CoreSite's unique position at the intersection of cloud, network, and AI ecosystems remains a key competitive advantage and gives us confidence in the platform's long-term growth trajectory. Given the strength of customer demand and leasing activity, we are once again raising our full-year outlook. We remain confident in our ability to execute against a development pipeline that can nearly triple our current capacity while continuing to evaluate opportunities to accelerate capacity additions where customer demand and expected returns support additional investment. Moving to our second strategic priority, operational efficiency. Our tower operations continue to perform with the consistency and discipline that we expect. We remain focused on simplifying processes, scaling shared capabilities, and using technology to improve productivity.

These actions support our objective of expanding tower cash EBITDA margins by 200 to 300 basis points by 2030 while maintaining the service quality our customers depend on. We also continue to evaluate practical applications for AI across the organization. Our focus is on opportunities that improve decision-making, automate repetitive work, and make our teams more effective while maintaining the appropriate controls and oversight. We believe these capabilities can create incremental value over time and reinforce our culture of operational excellence. Our third strategic priority is disciplined capital allocation. Over the past several years, we have reshaped American Tower around higher-quality assets, developed markets, and businesses with attractive growth and return profiles. This quarter, we took another meaningful step forward by entering into an agreement to sell our Canada business.

The transaction allows us to recycle capital toward opportunities with greater potential to drive long-term AFFO per share growth, including investments in our tower portfolio and CoreSite, debt reduction, and share repurchases. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately $315 million of common stock, and subsequent to quarter end, our board approved an increase to our share repurchase authorization. Together, these actions reflect our continued confidence in the value of the company, as well as the flexibility provided by our balance sheet and cash flow generation. We continue to apply a disciplined capital allocation framework. We will first fund the dividend and attractive organic investment opportunities, maintain leverage within our target range, and then allocate incremental capital across share repurchases, selective M&A, and further deleveraging based on relative returns and market conditions.

The result is a more focused American Tower with a higher-quality earnings base, multiple avenues for growth, and the financial flexibility to invest through the cycle. We believe that combination positions us to deliver durable, industry-leading AFFO per share growth over time. In summary, I am pleased with our performance through the first nine months of the year and encouraged by the momentum that we continue to see across the business. Our premier global tower portfolio, differentiated interconnection-focused data center platform, strong balance sheet, and disciplined approach to capital allocation positions us exceptionally well to capitalize on the next wave of investment in wireless, cloud, and AI infrastructure. I want to thank our employees around the world for their continued dedication and execution, as well as our customers, shareholders, and business partners for their ongoing trust and support.