Crown Castle CEO Christian Hillabrant has said the company will look to deploy more Edge infrastructure as demand for compute grows.

The company sees Edge as a revenue driver in addition to its main offering as a tower operator.

Crown Castle has sought to focus its strategy in recent times as a pure‑play tower company in the US. During the Q2 financial quarter, the company recently closed the $8.5 billion sale of its fiber and small cells assets.

That sale was first announced in March 2025 as part of Crown's pivot to becoming a "pure-play" tower company.

These tower assets could indeed have an additional purpose as the company looks to support the Edge compute opportunity.

During the company's earnings call this week, Hillabrant once again highlighted Crown Castle's ambitions to service this market.

"As I step back and look at the discussions we are having with our customers, I am excited about the multiple demand drivers that we expect will benefit Crown Castle’s future growth, including increasing deployment of Edge compute infrastructure, continued growth in mobile data demand, and additional spectrum coming to market," he said.

Indeed, the company has been working with Edge data center providers, including working with Available Infrastructure on its own Edge AI network in recent months.

Hillabrant was coy on naming partners, but added that Crown Castle has seen growing interest in how its portfolio can support distributed compute deployments.

A solution for the data center problem?

He makes references to some of the challenges the data center industry is currently facing, such as power and construction constraints. Such hurdles present opportunities for tower companies that have land and power to step up, he adds.

Crown Castle is one of the biggest tower operators in the US, where it currently operates around 40,000 sites across the country.

"We believe the Edge opportunity is gaining momentum as demand for storage and compute continues to accelerate, while many large data center deployments face multi-year construction and power delivery delays," said Hillabrant.

"Crown Castle is positioned well to serve this demand in a capital-efficient manner through its nationwide network of tower sites, each with existing power and broadband connectivity, and can provide distributed move-in-ready locations for deployments requiring less than 0.2MW."

He likens the current landscape for the data center industry as something the tower industry has grappled with in the past, such as challenges around "the leasing, zoning, and permitting of these facilities, in addition to power delivery."

"What that’s opened up for us, and I think for others in this space, is here we have sites, they’re sites where we have the space. In many cases, we have shelters that are actually available for retrofit. We have power, we have backhaul connectivity, and therefore can provide these Edge data center opportunities," he added.

The ability to utilize these tower sites could unlock "incremental revenue" for Crown Castle and "fairly quickly," he adds.

On the topic of building more towers, Hillabrant said the company wants to build more, but only "where it makes absolute financial sense."

For the second quarter, Crown Castle reported a drop in site rental revenues of four percent to $967 million. The company blamed this on the impact from Dish's contract terminations and Sprint cancellations.

The company's legal battle with Dish is set to continue, even despite Dish's recent bankruptcy filing, Hillabrant told analysts.

"Now that Dish Wireless has filed for bankruptcy, we will be pursuing our $3.5bn contractual claim in the bankruptcy court," he said.

For the full year 2026, Crown Castle said it expects to generate site rental revenues of $3.855bn, compared to the $4.049bn last year.