American Tower Corporation (REIT)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the American Tower Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 11 on your phone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host, Spencer Kern, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. Welcome to our second quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm Spencer Kern, Head of Investor Relations for American Tower. Joining me on the call today are Steve Vondran, our President and CEO, and Rod Smith, our Executive Vice President, CFO, and Treasurer. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Before we begin, I need to call your attention to our safe harbor statement. It says that some of our comments today may be forward-looking. As such, they are subject to risks and uncertainties described in American Tower SEC filings, and results may differ materially. Additional information is available on our investor relations website. I'll now turn the call over to Steve. Steve?

Thanks, Spencer. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining today's call. We delivered another strong quarter fueled by robust leasing demand across our Global Tower portfolio, record leasing activity at CoreSite, and continued operational discipline. The strength and consistency of our execution, combined with the momentum we're seeing across the business, enabled us to raise our full-year outlook for the second time this year. Our performance reinforces what we believe is one of the most compelling long-term growth stories in digital infrastructure. Around the world, mobile data consumption continues to grow at an extraordinary pace. Cloud adoption remains resilient, AI-driven workloads are accelerating, and network architectures are becoming increasingly complex. Together, these trends are driving a growing need for the critical infrastructure that American Tower provides. Against this backdrop, we remain focused on the three strategic priorities we outlined at the start of the year, driving durable revenue growth, enhancing operational efficiency, and maintaining disciplined capital allocation. Starting with revenue growth, this year we remain on track to deliver approximately 4% organic tenant buildings growth across our global tower business, excluding one-time disrelated impacts. and we're raising our outlook to approximately 15% revenue growth from our data center business. The long-term outlook for wireless infrastructure remains exceptionally strong. Mobile data usage continues to expand globally, supported by increases in smartphone penetration, 5G adoption, fixed wireless access and a growing range of enterprise and consumer applications that rely on ubiquitous, high-quality connectivity. In the U.S., industry analysts estimate that mobile network capacity will need to at least double over the next five years to meet projected traffic demand. Notably, these forecasts largely reflect existing use cases and may not fully capture the incremental requirements associated with emerging technologies such as AI native applications, autonomous systems, or the transition to 6G. As carriers work to deliver this capacity, we believe the industry is approaching an inflection point. For the first time in several years, we see a path to four major catalysts creating multiple overlapping demand drivers that could support network investment well into the next decade. First, the industry is entering the next phase of the 5G investment cycle. While early deployments focus primarily on coverage, the next phase is expected to be focused on capacity. Based on our discussions with CARE customers, Supporting future traffic growth will require meaningful network densification, creating additional opportunities across our portfolio. Second, the industry is preparing for a significant new spectrum deployment cycle. With approximately 800 megahertz of new mobile spectrum expected to become available over the next few years, starting with the upper C block in 2027, operators will have new opportunities to expand network performance and capacity. Historically, new spectrum deployments have translated into incremental equipment installations and lease amendments, and we believe this cycle could represent another meaningful source of growth. Third, the eventual transition to 6G will bring another meaningful infrastructure investment cycle. Early indications point toward architectures that leverage higher frequency spectrum, greater intelligence at the network edge, and more distributed deployments. These characteristics would likely require both additional equipment and increased site density across wireless networks. And perhaps the most exciting catalyst is the emergence of AI applications. We believe AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape how people, enterprises, and machines interact with wireless networks. From AI-powered smartphones and smart glasses to connected vehicles, autonomous systems, robotics, and real-time edge computing applications, Future traffic patterns are expected to be more persistent, more data intensive, and increasingly bidirectional than those of today's networks. According to Erickson's most recent mobility report, AI-enabled applications are already contributing to uplink traffic growth rates that in many cases exceed downlink traffic growth by more than 50%. This is a significant development because today's networks were primarily designed around downstream consumption. As AI adoption accelerates, operators may need to invest beyond their existing network roadmaps to support these evolving requirements, creating an additional layer of infrastructure demand on top of traditional traffic growth. Taken together, these trends point toward a future that requires significantly more capacity, greater network density, lower latency, and enhanced connectivity. Terrestrial wireless networks will unquestionably remain the foundation of that future, and our global portfolio of communications infrastructure is exceptionally well positioned to support this next era of wireless innovation and investment. Many of these same secular tailwinds continue to drive exceptional performance at CoreSight. CoreSight continues to differentiate itself as a premier digital infrastructure platform at the convergence of network connectivity, cloud ecosystems, enterprise workloads and AI-driven demand. CoreSight remains the fastest growing segment of our business, and this quarter delivered another record leasing performance, reinforcing our conviction that 2026 has the potential to be another record year for the business. Demand remains broad-based, spanning hyperscale cloud providers, enterprises, network operators, AI innovators, and a growing number of cloud-to-cloud connectivity deployments. What we're seeing is not simply an expansion of demand, but an evolution in how customers are architecting their digital infrastructure with CoreSight serving as the central hub. CoreSight's campuses have become critical destinations for AI traffic and data exchange. Today, nine of the top 10 AI companies and three of the top five NeoClouds are deployed within our facilities. These customers are moving beyond traditional co-location use cases, establishing private on-ramps that enable the direct transfer of massive data volumes Thank you for joining us today. Since acquiring CoreSight in 2021, we've grown our megawatts in service by one and a half times, and our development pipeline provides a clear path to nearly triple our capacity from here. We believe these investments create a substantial runway for sustained double-digit revenue growth. And given the strength of customer demand, we continue to evaluate opportunities to expand our development pipeline even further to accelerate value creation for our shareholders. Moving to our second strategic priority, operational efficiency. Operational excellence has long been a defining characteristic of American Tower. Over the past three years, we've expanded Tower Cash EBITDA margins by more than 300 basis points while leading the industry in profitability. We continue to identify opportunities to operate our global portfolio more efficiently, and we remain on track to deliver an additional two to 300 basis points of Tower Cash EBITDA margin expansion In parallel, we're exploring ways to leverage AI and automation to enhance productivity across the organization. While still early, we believe these technologies have the potential to create meaningful incremental value over time. Our third strategic priority is disciplined capital allocation. We continue to allocate capital with a focus on driving industry-leading AFFO per share growth while generating the highest risk-adjusted returns. Over the last several years, We've deliberately shifted our investment focus toward developed markets and higher quality earnings streams. Consistent with that strategy, during the quarter we completed the sale of our operations in the Philippines and Bangladesh, marking our exit from the APAC region. We expect the transaction to be neutral to AFFO per share growth, while enhancing the quality and focus of our global tower portfolio. Our balance sheet remains in an excellent position. We ended the quarter with leverage within our targeted range of three to five times, and we continue to maintain one of the strongest credit profiles in our peer group. Combined with our significant cash flow generation, our balance sheet provides substantial flexibility as we evaluate opportunities across M&A, share repurchases, and further deleveraging. Taken together, we believe American Tower has one of the highest quality growth profiles in the digital infrastructure sector. Supported by industry-leading U.S. tower assets, Faster growing international tower assets and a differentiated data center platform. In summary, I'm extremely pleased with our performance through the first half of the year. American Tower has never been better positioned to capitalize on the powerful secular trends shaping our industry. Our portfolio of towers and data centers is uniquely positioned to benefit from growing mobile data consumption, expanding cloud adoption, and the accelerating proliferation of AI-driven workloads and applications. I want to thank our employees around the world for their continued dedication and execution, as well as our customers, shareholders, and business partners for their ongoing trust and support. With that, I'll turn the call over to Rod to review the financial results and allocate more details. Rod?