American Tower president and CEO Steven Vondran has admitted that Edge computing hasn't taken off as the company had initially expected.

He made the comments during the company's second-quarter earnings call.

The company has pushed hard on its Edge bets, notably through its acquisition of CoreSite, which it acquired for $10.1 billion in November 2021.

CoreSite runs 28 data centers across 11 markets in the US, including key data center hubs in New York, Northern Virginia, and Silicon Valley.

American Tower's acquisition of CoreSite was largely because the company saw the value in Edge, stated Vondran during an earnings call.

"Well, just to remind everyone, the reason that we bought CoreSite was because... we think that Edge compute is a huge opportunity to drive value to our tower portfolio over time," said Vondran.

"And we believe that owning the access to the interconnection environment that Edge has to be connected to gives us the right to win in that space. And our initial timing on that was a little bit off. It's developing slower than we thought it was going to," he added.

Despite this, Vondran is confident that this will change, noting that wireless carriers are talking more about the Edge. "So we still think that that strategic reason for buying CoreSite holds true," he said.

He described Edge as a "compelling play that will develop over time," adding that the company will continue to invest in CoreSite to maximize the value of the business.

ATC also operates several small Edge colocation sites - branded as Access Edge data centers - at existing tower locations in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Jacksonville, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Denver and Boulder, Colorado.

Leveraging land

Although traditionally a tower company – ATC owns and operates more than 226,000 telecommunications assets across 25 countries – the opportunity to push Edge has been a big priority for the business, in particular at tower sites.

Last year, Jake Rasweiler, SVP of innovation in the US tower division of American Tower, told DCD that these existing assets provide the perfect interconnectivity for Edge.

“If you think about a typical interconnect data center, it's a location where enterprise clouds and networks are all coming together,” Rasweiler said. “And these larger tower sites where we are deployed already have multiple network operators and landline operators present.

“The fact we have power, fiber, and land makes it easier to build a data center or extend the use of that land to a data center, so we think that's a natural way for us to extend the capabilities that we already have on our tower sites.”

Revenue up 3.2 percent, driven by data center growth and 5G upgrades

For the quarter, ATC reported an increase in total revenue of 3.2 percent to $2.62 billion, while total property revenue also increased for the quarter by 1.2 percent to $2.52bn.

Although net income decreased 58.1 percent to $381 million, ATC said it was due to foreign currency losses in the current period.

The company stated that the deployment of midband upgrades from the US carriers has helped push revenue. This was in line with comments made by Vondran during the first quarter of the year.

“Demand for our high-quality global portfolio of telecommunications sites continued into the second quarter. In the US, broad-based midband upgrades, paired with accelerating densification activity, supported one of the highest quarters of US services revenue contributions on record. Growing demand for AI-ready interconnection solutions fueled double-digit growth at CoreSite," said Vondran.

"While we continue to manage through certain customer events, particularly in Latin America, international activity remains steady, with a solid cash flow conversion enhanced through cost and capital discipline."

Once again, ATC also touched on its data center business, CoreSite, which finalized its acquisition of a multi-tenant data center facility in Denver, Colorado, in April 2025. The facility currently hosts CoreSite’s DE1 data center operations.

The company said that its property revenue for its data center business grew by more than 13 percent for the quarter.

"We continue to see exceptional performance from CoreSite and have increased our 2025 expectations to reflect new growth attributable to the recently acquired DE1 facility as well as elevated demand and pricing from our broader portfolio of interconnection data center facilities," added Vondran.

According to Vondran, the emergence of AI-related workloads, including inferencing, machine learning models, and GPU-as-a-service, "represents a fast-growing component of CoreSite leases."