Great. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the American Tower Fireside Chat at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. My name is Mike Ng, and I cover AMT and telecom services and infrastructure here at the firm. I have the privilege of introducing Steve Vondran, who's the President and CEO of American Tower. First and foremost, thank you so much for being here this afternoon, Steve. It's an absolute pleasure to have you. Yeah, thanks for inviting us. Great. To kick things off, I was just wondering if you could talk about some of the strategic priorities that you're focused on. Last quarter, during earnings, American Tower raised its full-year outlook for the second time this year. You've also talked about long-term outlook for wireless infrastructure just being exceptionally strong, s o what's working well, and what are some of the key things that you're most focused on? Sure. Thanks, Michael. Well, as we said on the first quarter call, I'm excited because for the first time in a long time, we're seeing four different catalysts for building in the business. When I look out over the short, mid, and long term, there are a lot more demand catalysts coming in than we've seen in a while, and that excites me a lot. Our goal is to position ourselves to best capture that demand that's coming and to deliver industry-leading AFFO per share growth. The strategic priorities that were outlined for 2026, first and foremost, to focus on organic growth in the portfolio, making sure that we're capturing the growth that we're seeing from that first catalyst, which is densification from 5G, and being there for our carrier customers as they're augmenting their networks today. The second strategic priority is really focused around expanding our margins. We have been very successful over the past few years in expanding margins. It is a key priority for us always, cost control. We have expanded margins by about 300 basis points over the last few years, and we have committed to doing another 200 to 300 over the next few years. Operating an efficient organization that still supports that carrier activity to capture as much of that business that we can is the second priority. The third is capital allocation, making sure that we are using the cash flow that comes in, that we generate in our business, in a way that creates the most long-term shareholder value. That is whether we are investing in new assets or whether we are buying back shares or de-levering any of those options out there, making sure that we are making the right decisions at the right time. Great. As we think about some of the catalysts that you have highlighted, 5G densification, 6G, I was wondering if you could just help us size or thinking about the near-term opportunity for those things and what that eventual transition to 6G means for the long-term leasing outlook. Sure. We look at these four catalysts as self-reinforcing. The first is densification, and it is something that we always expected to happen as part of 5G. If you think about how carriers deploy their networks, the first phase of a build is a coverage build that is largely amendment driven. After that, you start focusing on capacity. You still get some amendments there, but the carriers start looking at different ways to add capacity to their networks. They will add some capacity through technology improvements, some through spectrum additions, but a lot of it comes through densification. We are already seeing that. We have seen a shift in the mix of our new business, a little bit less on the amendment side, more on the co-location side, but all underpinning a steady level of investment by the carrier. The first catalyst is happening now, and we expect that to continue to accelerate over time. The second catalyst is a little bit farther out, 6G, but it's just around the corner. If you look at the standards bodies, they're expected to come out with standards in 2029, which means commercial deployments probably happen 2030, 2031, somewhere in that area. You'll probably see some activity before that. You'll see some proofs of concept, some early-stage networks, similar to what we did in 5G. The third, which will happen throughout this whole process, is spectrum availability. We've seen some spectrum auctions this year. We're going to see some more next year. The Big Beautiful Bill has earmarked 800 MHz of spectrum to come to market over the next several years, and that's great for towers. Historically speaking, more spectrum equals more equipment, and we expect that to happen again with the new spectrum that's coming out. That'll come over time, and there's a cadence at which that spectrum is going to become available, but that should be a catalyst for a number of years. AI is something that is another catalyst that we don't know exactly when that's going to hit. We know that it's a small piece of network traffic today, but we also know there's an asymmetric pattern with AI that's different than the normal usage. There's more uplink required. We think that as that grows, that's going to put more stress on the network and require more investment. When we look at all the four of those together, you've got near-term, medium-term, and long-term drivers that we see creating a great path of growth for us from now going forward. Great. If I could double-click or dive into the catalyst around spectrum availability. AT&T closed its acquisition of the 600 MHz of spectrum from Dish Network back in August, and Verizon was a very significant bidder in the AWS-3 D auction this past June. Are you seeing any uptick in carrier activity from those spectrum deals yet, or would you expect to at this point? Well, I will leave it to them to talk about their particular cadence, but what I would say is it takes a little bit of time when you buy spectrum for you to get the planning, buy the equipment, and deploy it. It doesn't happen the day after necessarily that we start seeing amendment activity, but you do see network planning starting to happen. If you're spending billions of dollars to buy spectrum, you're going to want to deploy that as soon as you can. So I would expect for all of our carriers to be aggressively laying out their plans, ordering equipment. I would expect to see that activity coming pretty quickly after the spectrum's cleared. Great. Then on the 800 MHz that's mandated for auction by 2034, including the 160 MHz of Upper C-band next year, how would you frame the opportunity here? How should investors think about that as a potential catalyst? Yeah. Well, again, historically speaking, more spectrum equals more equipment, and we'd expect that to be the same going forward. Okay. We believe it's a big positive for us, and that's just assuming that the incumbent carriers buy it. If someone else buys it and you had another network deployed, that'd be a whole different catalyst. That's not in any of our numbers. That would be upside from where we are today, but that's always a possibility. But that 800 MHz is critically needed by our carriers to meet mobile traffic demand. If you think about mobile data growth, it's growing double digit or better every year. Network capacity needs to double by the end of the decade. Carriers will get some of that through technology upgrades. The rest is going to come from spectrum and site densification. So we think the 800 MHz is a big opportunity for us, and it'll clear over time. It won't all be available day one. I expect that to happen in a cadence similar to prior swaths of spectrum, where carriers buy it. You've got to clear it. They'll focus on pockets where they need it the most, spend more money to do that sooner, and some of that'll come available over time. Great. Since you mentioned the potential for someone other than the three major players becoming more aggressive in terms of spectrum, maybe we can talk about satellite and Starlink. Is it a positive or is it a negative for towers? Just how would you frame it for everybody? We've been getting this question a lot for the past several months, and I'm going to say it again. There's nothing negative for towers in the satellite business. We bought a position in AST in the early days to get a board seat so that we would have a ringside seat to this as it develops. Satellites are a fantastic complement to the existing terrestrial networks. They can provide ubiquity of coverage where you don't have it today. They can enable new use cases, new revenue streams for our customers. It's a net positive for the industry. It's not a threat to towers. Satellites are not going to replace towers as the primary method by which people are getting their coverage. There's been a lot of notes written about it, so I won't go on too much of a rant about this. I will just say, from a technology perspective and a spectrum perspective, the only places that it's going to meet the need is ultra rural. I have very few towers there today, if any. If I have towers there, they're not going to be our most productive because you're not going to have multiple carriers on them, s o from our perspective, satellites are good for the industry, they're good for towers, and they provide a lot more upside than they do any potential downside. Great. That is very clear. Going back to how you opened the session on key priorities, you talked about margin expansion. I was just wondering if you could expand a little bit and talk about what underpins those margin goals and if you could just walk through some of the key drivers of the operational efficiencies that you can achieve. Sure. We have always been cost conscious, and when your margins are as high as ours are, it is always tough to get that extra juice when you squeeze it. We have got four pillars that we have laid out. The first is managing our land costs across the globe, and we have got some very successful programs in the U.S. that we have done that with for a couple of decades. By globalizing that program and being more aggressive there, we think land expense is one piece of it. The second is globalizing our operations and taking advantage of a global supply chain. We think that we can get better deals just by concentrating our spend in a little bit different way than we have in the past. The third is, it is a little hard to explain this. We call it our standard of care, and it is essentially the way we operate our sites in the U.S. You provide a consistent standard of care for them, but you are also doing preventative maintenance so that it costs less to operate over time. We can actually reduce R&M by doing a better job maintaining sites today and not letting things get too bad where they cost more to fix. As we roll that out globally, we will get some savings there. Then finally, we will continue to focus on SG&A control across the globe using this global organization that we are focused on. Great. That is not counting AI, by the way. We actually think that AI could be a further catalyst for more savings. It is early days on that, and so not ready to put a stake in the ground for what it can produce and got to make sure our token costs are not too high, just like everybody else is working on. We look forward to sharing what we think we can do on that as well. Super interesting. I am looking forward to hearing about what you guys are doing internally with AI over time. Just on organic tenant billings growth. This year, American Tower is obviously seeing some one-time headwinds from Dish churn and organic growth should accelerate from here on out. Could you talk a little bit about your outlook for global and U.S. organic tenant billings growth? You want me to give 2027 guidance today? If you would like. I don't think so. Nice try. Look, it is too early to talk about 2027. We will give guidance in February on that. What I would say is if you look at our organic tenant billings growth in 2026, and you normalize out for Dish, it is about 4.5%. Within that 4.5%, the new business from new leases and amendments is about 2.5%. If you look back at 2025, the contribution from new leases and amendments was about 2.5%. That is kind of a normal investing environment. That has been a pretty steady state for the next couple of years. If you believe next year is going to be a normal leasing environment, that is not a bad reference point. We are not ready to guide yet because we need to see what the carriers are going to do. We have two carriers that are comprehensive agreements, but not everything is covered in that. Some of the new leasing is outside of that, and we have one that is not on the comprehensive agreement, s o when we look at 2027, we have some variability in there based on how quickly they decide to act. We will be more comfortable giving that in February once we have a better idea, b ut when we focus on the long-term growth algorithm, what we expect to see over time, we have given multi-year guidance in the past to consider a normal leasing environment, and it has been kind of right in that mid-single digits range, and that is what our long-term growth algorithm calls for. Over time, we have given you guys the guidance. Year to year, depending on when people start and stop and things like that, it can have a little bit of variability. So we will give you guys that in February. But nice try. I have to try. It is my job. If we could maybe talk a little bit about the international footprint. We are starting to see some carrier consolidation in Europe. There are reports that Vodafone Spain will move sites onto your portfolio beginning in 2028, on the other hand. Would you talk a little bit about your European portfolio? How do you feel it is positioned relative to some of the potential consolidation? Sure. We were very patient before we decided to enter Europe. We sat on the sidelines because a lot of the deals that we saw did not have the right terms and conditions or did not have the right counterparties and things like that, s o when we did enter, it was with Telefónica as a partner s o we feel very good about our position because we are partnered with one of the strongest carriers there. So we do not expect either consolidation to affect our anchor tenant, and we do not have a lot of exposure on the churn side to some of the folks that may or may not be in there. On the contrary, it is an opportunity for us. When you look at some of the consolidation that has happened, you had weaker carriers who are not investing in their networks as much. They've consolidated into a stronger carrier, and they are investing now. We're actually seeing the opportunity to increase our sales into these new carriers because they're not big tenants on the portfolio and because it's anchored really by one of the top quality carriers there, and people want to replicate that coverage. We feel very good about the current portfolio there. Now, Europe in general, we tend to generalize it as a continent. It's really each individual country is its own investment case. When we think about Europe as a business, we feel very good about the three countries that we're in. There are other countries that would be attractive if we found the right terms and conditions in the portfolios, but we really haven't found that opportunity yet. Great. If I could ask about the international portfolio as a whole. You divested the Philippines and the Bangladesh assets, and that's allowed a sharper focus on some of your developed markets. Maybe you can just talk about the strategy around call it the pruning or the re-architecture of the international portfolio, and what opportunities are in some of the emerging markets. Sure. Just to kind of reiterate the strategy that we laid out a couple of years ago when I took over as CEO, it is to decrease our exposure to emerging markets over time. It's not because we don't believe in those markets. They're good growth drivers. They can perform very well for us. There's just a little bit more volatility there, and we think that we had a little bit too much exposure in our portfolio. Just like you guys would rebalance your portfolio, we want to rebalance ours to have less exposure over time. Some of the pruning is related to that, but really it's about making sure that we're generating the best risk-adjusted returns that we can with the best growth prospects. In markets where we're subscale, if we think that we can create more value by selling it, we will. But one of the things that we've also done over the past two years is to sculpt the portfolio a little bit differently. As part of our globalization efforts, we're running them more out of regional hubs or through our international organizations and getting all those markets to be more sustainable and free cash flow positive, but here's no impetus to sell them. We don't have to sell them, and that lets us be more targeted and sell them when it creates more value, and otherwise we'll just hold them and harvest the cash flow. Not going to telegraph any more divestitures, but if it creates more value to sell it, we will. Otherwise, we'll hold it and harvest. Great. Very clear. One of the assets that makes American Tower differentiated relative to peers is the data center business, CoreSite. The business seems like it is doing phenomenally well, right? Record leasing activity, five consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth in the segment. Could you just spend a minute talking about what is happening in CoreSite and the tailwinds that the business is benefiting from? Yeah. CoreSite has been an amazing performer for us. We are seeing record growth in it. We are seeing record sales in it. I do want to make sure I distinguish that it is not just a data center company, it is an interconnection hub. It is a little bit different from most data center companies out there. We curate a mix of customers. It is clouds, networks, and enterprises. What we knew when we bought CoreSite, that it would meet or exceed the business case with the demand drivers that were there. That is really enterprises that needed to be in a multi-cloud environment to connect into their web tools. What we have seen happen is that has expanded and become even more important with the advent of AI and inferencing. Now enterprises want to be in a multi-cloud, multi-inferencing location, and they need to be in that same campus because they are direct connecting into those tools. Nobody wants to use just one. They want to use multiple. It is this kind of virtuous cycle that is happening. The more cloud on-ramps you get, the more inferencing hubs want to go there, the more inferencing hubs and cloud on-ramps, the more the networks want to be there. That dynamic has let us underwrite higher yields, higher rates, more interconnection, and more demand for the facilities. Our desire is to keep growing that business. We have increased capacity about 1.5 times since we bought it. We are continuing to invest in it and increase capacity. We have got more under construction today than we have ever had under construction there before. We are going to continue to invest in that and try to grow it. Great. I was wondering if you could spend a minute just talking about the customer composition at CoreSite. How much of it is hyperscalers presumably wanting to be co-located there to support those cloud on-ramps versus enterprise customers today that obviously need those interconnections? How do you expect that mix to evolve, if at all? Sure. We actually curate a mix of that. Because we are not doing single-tenant buildings and things like that, we want all of them in there, but we do not want anybody to be too dominant in it. The way we kind of curate that mix is, the enterprise is our core customer, and that is also the hyperscaler's customer. We are bringing their customer to them, and that is why they want to be there. They want to be there to interconnect to those enterprises. The installations that you see from the hyperscalers are not these massive LLMs and things like that. It is a smaller footprint with their on-ramps to really connect into those. We are not overexposed to any one particular company or even segment on that. It really is a little bit of our secret sauce, how we curate that mix and create that ecosystem effect. Great. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about just the demand environment. I think you mentioned that 36 MW of the under construction capacity has about 8% already pre-leased. Maybe that is a good leading indicator or a KPI for what demand is. How would you talk about what the demand trends are for CoreSite? Well, there is more demand than we can service. There is a huge amount of demand, and our pre-leasing could be higher. We are being a little bit more cautious on our pre-leasing because some of that delivery date is a little bit further out. What we have seen is pricing continues to move up on it. We have also just brought a lot of things online that have a much higher pre-leasing. It is a little bit skewed based on the fact that some things just went in service. But the overall demand environment is very robust. Again, what it allows us to do is curate that customer mix. When we look at kind of underwriting the new business, we are able to make sure that we have only the most creditworthy tenants, only people that promote the ecosystem and the interconnects, and that we are not just putting folks in there because they want the space. It is because they actually are people we want there to keep building that ecosystem. That is great. There is a discrete fee that you can charge for interconnections beyond just renting floor space, right? Yes. We have an interconnection revenue line. Yep. We are seeing some record growth in there. If I could just shift gears maybe to capital allocation. AMT is in a much stronger strategic footing given its delevering and reducing and pruning some of its emerging market exposure. The company is firmly in their target range. What is next? What do you see as the next best investments that American Tower can pursue, whether that be more capital investments in data centers, domestic M&A, buybacks? Sure. We take a very disciplined approach to capital allocation. When you think about what we are funding, first and foremost, we fund our dividend. After the dividend, we look at the remaining cash flows that we are going to allocate, and we are really trying to figure out what is going to give us the best long-term returns on it. Historically, a lot of our internal CapEx investments are giving us the best return. Things like investing in CoreSite or the build-to-suits we are doing in Europe, et cetera. But we generate more cash than we can deploy there. If we could source more opportunities there, that would be a great place to put it. Then we are actually balancing after we fund those internal CapEx deployments. We look at M&A, we look at share buybacks, and we look at further delevering, and we try to make the decision kind of real time, mathematically based, what is going to give us the best returns. What you have seen us do this year is we have deployed about $600 million over the past several months into, I guess, including the last part of last year, into share buybacks. That is what we thought was going to create the most value on that capital deployment. But we really look at everything kind of real time, figuring out if there was an M&A deal or if delevering made more sense. Right. Just focusing on the U.S. for a moment, how do you weigh the opportunities around new tower builds, M&A, or ground lease buyouts? Maybe you can just walk through how you think about where the most attractive returns are. Well, people ask me who my favorite child is, towers or data centers, and they will do it in front of my team sometimes. I still think tower is the best business model ever made. There is more capital intensity on the data center. It is a fantastic, the second-best business model I have ever seen, but towers are my first love. Unfortunately, we have not found many opportunities to build in the U.S. recently. I am hoping that changes, but we have not found many opportunities to build or buy at any scale in the U.S. So when we look at what is the next best option, data centers have been a great investment for us. Great. It is growing very well, some of the highest yielding returns that we can get. Land buybacks are opportunistic. We get good returns on it. It is very safe investment, but it also protects our towers and the revenue streams there. We will continue to fund that at a robust level, but it is not material enough to compete with the other stuff. We can do that and the other stuff we need to do. Great. Outside of the United States, focusing on new builds, you have targeted 700 new builds in Europe and have, I think, still signaled an interest in building more. How is the European build program tracking, and what gives you greater visibility to build out there relative to what you just described in the U.S.? Sure. Well, we have our agreement with Telefónica, which underpins a lot of the activity there. Look, we are excited about those new builds. They come with a good yield on the anchor tenant, and these are really expanding the footprint there. If you go to Europe, if you get outside the major cities, you are going to have some coverage issues, and some of this is government mandated to do that, and some of it is the carriers doing that. But we feel good about the long-term prospects of those towers because we were able to build in all the right protections and terms and conditions to give us good growth over time on those. If we could find more opportunities there like that, we would take them. It is not always easy to source those opportunities. Great. If I could just ask about AI workloads. Obviously, a tremendous amount of focus on which companies will benefit from AI. What do you think it all means for AMT, whether that is increased densification for 5G or 6G, the edge tower sites, CoreSite? What is your view on what the next few years will bring from a network requirement perspective, and how do you make sure American Tower is well-positioned here? Sure. CoreSite is benefiting now. Right. I talked about the inferencing installations, and it is also the enterprises are actually putting their own inferencing models in, s o we are seeing our enterprise customers kind of outsizing their installations for that, s o we are already benefiting from it there. I think on the mobile networks, the AI traffic is a very small piece of the pie today, but I do think it is going to expand. I think with all these technologies, it starts out with what you are doing on a desktop in your house, but people do not want to be tethered to that. I think as usage grows, you will see AI changing the way people use their phones. I think that is going to put more strain on the networks. It is going to require more investment, hopefully new revenue streams to my customers to pay for that investment. I think it is going to be a huge catalyst for us over the next decade as that kind of expands. There is also a little bit of a change in the usage pattern on AI, and the most recent Ericsson report actually kind of highlights this, so I will give them a shout-out on this. While it is a small piece of the pie, it is a rapidly growing piece of the pie, and the uplink required by AI is more than what the networks are architected for today, s o it could mean that there is a network rearchitecture that has to be done over time for that, and that could also be a benefit for towers as the carriers kind of grapple with how to change the way that they manage their uplink and downlink. Great. Maybe just in the last couple of minutes here in closing, I was just wondering if you could just maybe tie it back all together for us and talk about what you're focused on execution-wise next 12 to 24 months, and things investors should watch out for. Look, we're focused on capturing as much of the new business across the globe as we can. The thing that we do that creates the most value for all of our shareholders is what my teams do every day, and that is going through, working with our customers, and making sure that we're best positioned, both from a customer service perspective, but also a portfolio perspective, to capture that demand. So that is always going to be top priority for us. We will continue to be cost-disciplined, just in our nature to do that. The third is really figuring out what the best use of that capital is. Are there other opportunities for us to get outsized returns in the space by investing it? If not, do we want to buy our stock back opportunistically? I don't believe in programmatic ones. I've been very clear about that, but opportunistically buying back shares. As we think through those, that's really what we're focused on is what's going to create the best long-term shareholder value, what gives us industry-leading AFFO per share growth, and how do we make sure that we're primed to capture as much of those four catalysts that are coming as we can. Great. Well, Steve, thank you so much for participating in our conference. It's been an absolute privilege to have you on stage here. Thanks. Thank you.