American Tower Corporation was formed in 1995 as a tower division of American Radio Systems, the radio group Steven B. Dodge had built. The premise was a structural inefficiency in early wireless: each carrier built and maintained its own steel towers, duplicating expensive structures in the same locations. American Tower offered a neutral alternative, building or buying a tower once and leasing space on it to competing carriers. When CBS acquired American Radio Systems in June 1998, the tower business was separated out and listed on the New York Stock Exchange with more than 1,800 towers across 44 states and the District of Columbia, and it began buying portfolios from carriers that wanted the capital back.
Why colocation drives the economics
The metric that matters is tenants per tower. Putting up a 200-foot structure requires upfront capital, land control and a zoning process that can run for years. With one tenant, the return is modest. Adding a second or third set of antennas to the same structure costs comparatively little, so most of that incremental rent flows through to operating profit. That is why American Tower delivered FY2025 property revenue of $10,305 million at a 67.0% adjusted EBITDA cash margin, and why the company spends more effort filling existing towers in the United States than building new ones.
The bargaining position with carriers
Carriers compete on network quality, and a tower is not easily substituted. If an operator removes its antennas from a site, coverage in that area degrades, and building a replacement structure nearby is often impossible for zoning reasons. Leases therefore run for multi-year initial terms with renewal options and contractual escalators, typically a fixed percentage in the United States and inflation-linked in many international markets. The balance is not one-sided: consolidation cuts the number of tenants. When T-Mobile absorbed Sprint, redundant Sprint sites were decommissioned over several years, producing churn that American Tower is still working through.
REIT structure and global reach
American Tower qualified as a real estate investment trust for the taxable year beginning January 1, 2012, after a board decision in May 2011 and a stockholder vote that November. Qualifying US real estate income is distributed to shareholders instead of taxed at the corporate level, while international operations sit in taxable REIT subsidiaries. The company started in Mexico in 1998 and Brazil in 1999, then scaled through acquisitions: SpectraSite in 2005, Global Tower Partners in 2013, exclusive rights to about 11,324 Verizon towers in 2015, Eaton Towers in Africa in January 2020, InSite Wireless in December 2020, and roughly 31,000 Telxius Towers sites in Germany, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina agreed in January 2021.
Leaving India and buying data centers
The international story is not only expansion. India became American Tower's largest market by site count, then turned into its biggest problem as a price war forced carrier consolidation and Vodafone Idea fell behind on rent. In January 2024 the company agreed to hand ATC India, about 76,000 communications sites, to Data Infrastructure Trust, an infrastructure investment trust sponsored by an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management; the deal closed on September 12, 2024 for total cash proceeds of about $2.5 billion. In the other direction, American Tower paid about $10.1 billion for the data center operator CoreSite, closing on December 28, 2021. CoreSite now runs 30 data centers in 11 US markets and produced $1,053 million of revenue in 2025, up about 14% year over year.
Where the portfolio stands
American Tower ended 2025 with 149,686 communications sites: 42,224 in the United States and Canada, 47,081 in Latin America, 32,524 in Europe and 27,857 in Africa and Asia-Pacific. FY2025 revenue was $10,645 million, up 5.1%, with adjusted EBITDA of $7.1 billion and net income attributable to common stockholders of $2,529.5 million. Growth is uneven by region: Africa and Asia-Pacific property revenue rose 17.8% and Europe 12.3%, while US and Canada revenue was flat and Latin America fell 4.4%. Net leverage closed the year at 4.9 times adjusted EBITDA, and roughly 85% of planned 2026 discretionary capital spending, including more than $700 million for data center development, is aimed at developed markets.
