Part Two of a Three-Part Series: JW Tower & Telecom's 2025 Outlook on American Tower's Tower & Land Acquisitions

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For American Tower in 2025, it is aggressively prioritizing the acquisition of land beneath its U.S. towers. When it comes to M&A and cell tower acquisitions, the company has signaled its intent to stay active in the market but, at least publicly, does not see any significant portfolios to their suiting at this time.

At JW Tower & Telecom Consulting (www.jwttc.com), we specialize in guiding landlords through American Tower’s aggressive push in 2025 for lease extensions, land acquisitions, and easements. Securing land has always been a top priority for tower companies—a strategy we know well from our experience as an Asset Acquisitions Attorney on their team years ago.

In 2024, American Tower spent approximately $144 million on ground lease purchases beneath its cell towers. For 2025, the company has projected a spend of $190 million to $210 million—a 30% to 45% increase over the previous year. As part of its push to secure long-term control of its tower sites, landlords can expect to be increasingly engaged by those working directly for American Tower and the vendors it hires to represent them (CGO, MD7, Nextier, The Lyle Company, and Tower Alliance).

2024 - American Tower CAPEX Results:

2025 - American Tower CAPEX forecast:

Quotable quotes from American Tower leadership from 2024/Q4 Earnings Transcript:

Land Purchases / Cell Tower Lease Buyouts

"Next, we're planning for $1.7 billion in capital deployments, of which $1.5 billion is discretionary in nature and includes the construction of 2,250 sites at the midpoint.

Approximately 80% of our discretionary spend is centered on our developed market platforms, including over $600 million in success-based investments toward our data center campuses to replenish the record level of capacity sold over the past several years, increased spend in the U.S., primarily toward land buyouts under our tower sites and continued acceleration in European new tower construction with 600 new sites planned."

-Rod Smith, CFO, American Tower

M&A / Cell Tower Acquisition

"Yes. There's nothing else that we're seeing out there right now, Rick. I mean there's a few portfolios that people are talking about, but nothing at this point looks to us to be something where we can create the type of value that we would need to see. I mean, again, to reiterate, for us to do something M&A, it has to be strategically important to us and one plus one has to equal three.

So, we've got to think that we can create more value in that portfolio than anybody else. So, it's possible we'll find some small portfolios domestically where we think that using our teams and what we know in marketing to our customers, we can do a better job than other folks. You might see some small portfolios like that. But at the end of the day, it's got to be better than a stock buyback for us to do M&A.

And so, we'll be holding the teams to a pretty high standard before we approve anything in the M&A world. So, nothing on the horizon right now that we see that would be compelling."

-Steven Vondran, CEO, American Tower

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