American Tower recently reported its Q4 2025 and full-year 2025 results, highlighting continued strong growth in its data center segment and a focus on disciplined investment in developed markets. Notably for investors and property owners with cell tower leases, the company spent more in the United States acquiring land interests through perpetual easements, prepaid ground leases, and land purchases than SBA Communications and Crown Castle combined, underscoring the strategic importance of securing long-term control of the ground beneath its towers. A modest increase in capital spending for these land acquisitions is forecast for 2026.
Overall Highlights:
- 2.74B in revenue, up 7.5% year over year
- Data Center revenue growth 14% year over year driven by CoreSite
- 2026 capital deployment of $1.9B with $1.8B discretionary, investments in data centers and over 700 new builds in Europe
- Continued focus on developed markets
- Leverage reduced to 4.9X, now within the 3 to 5 times target range
- $500M share buyback in 2025
- DISH revenues, similar to its competitors have been removed from their forecasts
Quotable: re: DISH Network and their contractual default to property owners and tower owners
“We continue to pursue legal action to recover the value of its remaining lease obligations, and while DISH’s default negatively impacts our 2026 outlook, in the long run, we expect our business to benefit from a healthier, well-capitalized customer base that can invest more heavily in their mobile networks.”
Steven O. Vondran | CEO, American Tower
Quotable: re: Expansion of land optimization program internationally
“With the creation of our global COO position last year, we have undergone an extensive review of the direct costs within our tower business in an effort to bend our cost curve and grow direct expenses at a slower rate than revenue. We identified four key areas of expense savings across our global tower portfolio. First, managing land expense, which is our most significant direct cost, by expanding our highly successful U.S.-based land optimization program to other markets. Second, implementing a global unified sourcing and supply chain to enable economies of scale, gain pricing advantages, and improve inventory management.”
Steven O. Vondran | CEO, American Tower
Quotable: re: M&A opportunities and focus on developed markets
“And so you should not expect to see us participating in M&A in emerging markets. We will continue to invest a small amount of capital there, you know, opportunistically doing redevelopment to support our organic billings growth there. And then we do have some build-to-suits that we are doing as part of multi-year commitment we entered into previously. As we think about capital allocation going forward, it is really focused on developed markets, predominantly the U.S., and then if there is an opportunity in Europe or elsewhere that is developed, you know, we will certainly evaluate that. But we are not seeing a lot of deal flow out there that we find attractive today.”
Steven O. Vondran | CEO, American Tower
Quotable: re: Satellites and the risk to ground based cell towers
“We talk to the engineers in the space. We talk to the dreamers in the space and what they are trying to do. That gives us a lot of confidence that satellites will be complementary to the terrestrial networks. 6G is likely to be designed with satellites being an integral part of an integrated network. But the simple physics of spectrum, the simple economics of having a constellation that has to consistently be replenished over time means that towers will always be the cheapest and best way of deploying the level of content, the volume of mobile data that consumers demand.”
Steven O. Vondran | CEO, American Tower
American Tower Land Buyout Program:
- American Tower, as forecast in their 2025 projections, landed within the $190M – $210M mark for 2025, landing at $194.4M for the year – a 49% increase year over year
- This strategic investment allows it to solidify long-term control over its tower sites from property owners
- As mentioned earlier in this article, American Tower is desirous of replicating its land buyout program beyond the United States
Source: 10K
- American Tower has a forecast of between $200M to $220M in capital spend to purchase cell tower ground leases from property owners, approximately a 5% increase from 2025 year over year
- In addition to American Tower reaching out directly via its employees, American Tower’s authorized vendors: CGO, MD7, Nextier, The Lyle Company, and Tower Alliance (Source: https://www.americantower.com/us/landowners) will continue to contact property owners on their behalf with the intent of extending and buying out leases from property owners
- If satellite technology were going to replace cell towers, why would an organization spend so much money securing leases going into the future?
Source: 10K
- American Tower has nearly identical risk factors to its other competitors in the space
- The land under the tower is one of the most quietly critical assets in the entire wireless infrastructure business
- The tower business model depends on control of the ground lease even though most investors focus on the tower and tenants
Source: 10K
Information for property owners with cell tower leases is available through JW Tower & Telecom Consulting at jwttc.com
