American Tower, the Fortune 500 communications infrastructure operator, has announced a $10.1 billion (£7.5bn) deal to buy data centre real estate company CoreSite Realty Corporation.
Through the deal, American Tower hopes to leverage CoreSite’s infrastructure to build on its own mobile edge compute offering.
American Tower CEO Tom Bartlett said: “We are in the early stages of a cloud-based, connected and globally distributed digital transformation that will evolve over the next decade and beyond.”
American Tower currently owns seven data centres and around 42,000 mobile tower sites across the US. With the CoreSite acquisition, an additional 25 data centres, 21 cloud on-ramps and 32,000 interconnections in urbanised regions will be added to the company’s holdings.
“We expect the combination of our leading global distributed real estate portfolio and CoreSite’s high quality, interconnection-focused data centre business to help position American Tower to lead in the 5G world,” added Bartlett.
“As the convergence of wireless and wireline networks accelerates and classes of communications infrastructure further align, we anticipate the emergence of attractive value creation opportunities within the digital infrastructure ecosystem.”
The deal plans to position American Tower’s mobile edge compute business in an optimal position prior to the mass proliferation of 5G low-latency applications across cloud, enterprise, and network ecosystems.
CoreSite’s CEO, Paul Szurek, stated: “The combined company [with American Tower] will be ideally positioned to address the growing need for convergence between mobile network providers, cloud service providers, and other digital platforms as 5G deployments emerge and evolve.
“In addition, we expect the enhanced scale and further geographic reach to provide a platform for the combined company to accelerate its growth trajectory and expand into additional US metro areas, as well as internationally, leveraging American Tower’s extensive presence across the globe.”
The merger is expected to close before the end of 2021, subject to regulatory approval.
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