EDGE COMPUTING
American Tower’ s route to edge capacity starts with real estate it already owns. The 2021 CoreSite acquisition paired two decades of colocation and interconnection experience with more than 149,000 communications sites, and it has since begun building compact Access Edge Data Centers at the base of existing towers rather than buying land.
Its Raleigh facility set the template: an N + 1 redundant site connected into CoreSite’ s ecosystem via the Open Cloud Exchange and Any2Exchange internet exchange, giving mobile operators and cloud providers a route into a new metro without a ground-up build. Around ten further sites are moving to Construction Ready status in the first half of 2026.
The advantage is sequencing. Site acquisition, planning consent and fibre routing can be the slowest parts of edge expansion, and at an existing tower all three are settled before anyone breaks ground, alongside standing relationships with the operators most likely to take space.
For an industry where site acquisition timelines routinely run longer than construction itself, converting an existing real estate footprint into edge capacity is a genuinely distinctive route to scale.