American Tower CEO Steven Vondran revealed that the company now owns Dish's abandoned 5G radios and antennas on its towers.

Vondran made the comments during the company's third-quarter earnings call, when asked about who has ownership of Dish's equipment on the company's towers.

It stems from the fallout of Dish's defaulted on payments to tower owners and infrastructure partners, including American Tower, after its parent company EchoStart said it was forced to sell spectrum to AT&T and SpaceX by the FCC.

This led to several lawsuits against Dish, including from American Tower, which has counted the cost of losing Dish as a customer after the towerco terminated its agreement with Dish following the dispute.

"There is an abandonment order in the bankruptcy. Yes, we own that equipment as of the date of that order," said Vondran. "As to the interest that other people may have in that equipment, I will let them speak to what they want to do with that. But we do own it, and we can provide access to that to all interested parties."

He followed this up by saying that American Tower was free to do "whatever we want with it," in regards to the Dish equipment. American Tower operates more than 42,000 towers in the US.

Those comments could be of interest to potential buyers, namely SpaceX, which has made no secret of its plans to compete with the US carriers in offering terrestrial coverage.

It was reported last week that SpaceX is looking to gain access to 80,000 cell sites across the US to support the company's ambitions to offer carrier services, and in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure company. Crown Castle, one of the biggest tower companies in the country confirmed it's one company that has been in talks with SpaceX.

Vondran, who was also asked about whether American Tower is in talks with SpaceX to support its carrier buildout, noted that the towerco is "talking to all those parties."

"Anybody who has wireless ambitions is probably somebody that we are talking to," he said.

Data center revenue up 16.3 percent

Understandably, data centers were also a hot topic during the earnings call. For the quarter, cash revenue growth in data centers was up 16.3 percent.

This growth helped American Tower increase its overall revenue for the quarter by 2.5 percent to $2.785 billion year-on-year (YoY), while increasing its overall outlook for the full financial year.

This led contributed to the total property revenue going up by 4.5 percent to $2.734bn, which was driven by 1.1 percent organic tenant billings growth and the surge in American Tower's data center segment.

As well as owning data center firm CoreSite, American Tower is developing a number of Edge data centers at cell tower sites across the US. The company has identified “more than 1,000 plots of land” that it owns or has long-term leases for potential development into multi-megawatt data centers.

"We believe in the connection between towers and data centers, and we think that that is going to continue to evolve and become more apparent. We think it is a great asset that we intend to continue growing" said Vondran.

He also spoke about Edge data centers, in particular around the company's 1MW facility in Raleigh, North Carolina, commenting that the company is "excited about everyone getting excited about Edge."

The Raleigh site has the potential to lease up to 4MW, and is soon to be leased up to 2MW, said Vondran.

"I’m happy to say that the first megawatt leased up already, and we’re about to go live on the second megawatt, and it’s almost completely leased up as well," said Vondran. "So we’re absolutely seeing demand for a little bit larger scale deployments as well at the Edge, as well as the smaller scale deployments."