Edge data centers are popping up everywhere right now as the industry seeks to expand closer to the end user
But it’s not just companies primarily focused on data centers that are interested in Edge: tower companies are hedging their bets, too. “We believe that the convergence of towers and cloud is something that will have a long-term trajectory and will happen as wireless carriers begin to convert their networks to 5G and upgrade their core,” said Jake Rasweiler, senior vice president of innovation for the American Tower division at American Tower.
“As the cloud continues to grow, we see the need for more and more decentralized processing.”
American Tower, which is primarily a tower company, is a publicly traded real estate investment trust that owns and operates more than 226,000 telecommunications assets in 25 countries. The company is also keen on other infrastructure. Unlike rivals like Crown Castle, which has already said it is not interested in the data center market, American Tower is fully on board with the idea. In 2021, American Tower agreed to acquire data center operator CoreSite for $10.1 billion. CoreSite operates 28 data centers in 11 U.S. markets, including key data centers in New York, Northern Virginia, and Silicon Valley. “With CoreSite, our digital ecosystem and our interconnection, we can use that as a platform to facilitate that deployment using our own land,” Rasweiler tells DCD.
“We have over 1,000 locations across the U.S. where we have multiple fiber providers, with land that can support multi-megawatt deployments, and we have the power today to scale up to accommodate that buildout. “That’s why the CoreSite ecosystem and the ATC territory are a great fit.”
He adds that the CoreSite acquisition has been able to enhance American Tower’s approach to data center growth.
“When we acquired CoreSite, we acquired an operating company with a lot of knowledge in this space,” he adds. “There’s been a tremendous amount of collaboration between American Tower and the CoreSite teams to be able to take best practices from the data center world and combine them with the ability to deploy that technology and those services in a distributed manner at scale.”
While CoreSite focuses on traditional data center markets, American Tower is also expanding its presence in Edge data centers.
It operates several small Edge colocation sites, called Access Edge data centers, at existing towers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Jacksonville, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; and Denver and Boulder, Colorado. Rasweiler explains that his firm categorizes different types of data centers into three categories: central regional data centers, typically in Tier 1 markets; secondary centers, called aggregation centers; and Access Edge, which are typically located on the tower and are typically less than 100 kW.
Tower sites can be ideal sites for Edge data centers, according to STL Partners senior consultant Matt Bamforth. “Towers are the perfect location for micro data centers because real estate in cities is expensive and limited, making it very difficult to build larger data centers there,” Bamforth said in a blog post last year. “Plus, they already have connectivity and power, which are critical to enabling data centers. “Tower companies (and mobile operators that still own their towers) can take advantage of this opportunity. Many next-generation applications will require last-mile processing to achieve the necessary latency. Meanwhile, operators are virtualizing their RAN, which will accelerate investment in tower-based data center-like facilities and consolidate network equipment into these facilities.”
Another infrastructure operator, SBA Communications, has also invested in the edge data center market and says it has up to 50 sites operating or under development.
Given American Tower’s large presence in the U.S., this presented an opportunity for the company to expand beyond traditional telecom infrastructure like towers. While finding new land to build any type of infrastructure is increasingly difficult in the United States, it has forced companies to rethink how to best use the land they own.
“The fact that we already have the land and presence near these major markets gives us an advantage in terms of the speed to market that we have with these assets,” Rasweiler explains. “It’s the best solution for capital efficiency and also to be able to leverage the land that we already have.”
The company believes that leveraging edge data centers on its towers is a no-brainer. “If you think about a typical interconnection data center, it’s a place where clouds and enterprise networks come together,” Rasweiler says. “And these larger tower sites that we’re already deployed at
“One of the key things we think about is sustainability and our ability to leverage digital infrastructure on land that we already have, because that’s land that’s already been used for this digital infrastructure,” Rasweiler says. “Now we’re just expanding that need to the local community and our existing customers.”
In June, American Tower broke ground on a new data center in Raleigh, North Carolina, that Rasweiler says fits with its community center plans. According to the company, the aggregation hubs are designed to extend cloud services closer to the Edge, highlighting the potential to enable technologies such as hybrid cloud and AI.
The 4,000-square-foot (371 square meter) facility will initially offer 1 MW and is expected to come online in the first quarter of 2025, and will be the first for American Tower. In the end, the site will have the potential to offer 4 MW in 16,000 square feet (1,485 square meters) in the complete construction. The site will take advantage of the direct cooling of expansion and the containment of hot hot corridors to offer an average of 15kw on the shelf. Rasweiler points out the importance of Raleight’s construction, stating that it is the first construction of many destined to offer 1MW. He told DCD that he has decided to build the first place in Raleight due to his existing presence in the state. “We thought Raleigh was an interesting market because we have a strong presence in North Carolina,” he says. “We chose that market because it’s the capital of North Carolina, one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. “It also has the ‘research triangle’ [a trio of research-focused universities] and major institutions and technology companies that are in that market, which we think are our natural customer base for what we’re trying to do.”
According to Rasweiler, American Tower could place data center-enabled assets within 50 miles of 99 percent of the continental U.S. population by placing them at the base of its towers.
Although currently under construction, the work underway at the Raleigh site can be replicated at future ATC sites, he says. The company says that several locations have been designated as “shovel ready,” indicating that construction design has begun and aggregation Edge data centers can be rapidly built based on demand at these sites.
“We’ve approached this as more of a build-to-suit model,” he explains. “We do custom builds in the tower industry and have been doing that for years as American Tower.
“We have land that can accommodate multi-megawatt installations, plus fiber and power. “So we’re doing early development to qualify those sites so they’re ready to go and give us the ability to build them out quickly.”
When it comes to edge use cases, Rasweiler is excited about IoT (Internet of Things) and AI inference, and hopes they’ll support customer service use cases.
“We fully expect Raleigh and future edge data centers to be able to support a wide variety of applications,” he says, noting that the facility is designed for higher-density computing. “On average, since the first day he admits 15kw for shelf, but we can support a much greater power density for shelf and we can also accommodate water cooling as necessary with this design.” When asked what kind of customers the sites will use, Rasweiler says he hopes it is a combination of companies, network operators and cloud suppliers.
Speaking of the cloud, Rasweiler points out how significant it is for devices and edge use cases. \ “We believe you will see this convergence between tower and cloud,” he explains. “If you look at the types of applications that are performed on the main devices of our customers, they are using those applications are increasingly focused on the cloud, video and fixed wireless. “We’ve seen that there’s going to be more direct connectivity between wireless users and the cloud, and we see this as a natural extension of that. We’ve also seen a belief that these cloud networks are going to become more and more distributed. It is difficult to predict exactly when, but we believe that our land is a natural job for this.
To support the company’s cloud skills, he signed an association agreement with the IBM technological giant at the beginning of this year.
Collaboration means that the functionality of the IBM hybrid cloud and the Red Hat Onshift will be accessible in the ecosystem of the American Tower Access Edge data center and will provide customers with access to Edge, IoT, 5G, Ai and Automazection of Networks.
American Tower will deploy IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and systems across its distributed real estate locations, creating an “edge cloud,” and may also deploy them at client sites.
At the time, IBM noted that using its cloud computing platform would give companies greater flexibility in deploying applications, whether in public clouds, at the edge, or on-premises. “This can help securely process and rapidly analyze data closer to where it’s created,” IBM said in January.
IBM is “very strong in the enterprise space and helping clients automate and improve their operations,” according to Rasweiler.
He adds: “We see our two worlds complementing each other and their ability to solve problems for clients and deploy infrastructure, and our ability to offer the data center that can house that infrastructure. Focused on the U.S….for now
Only about a fifth of American Tower’s tower infrastructure is in the U.S., as it also has a sizable presence in Europe, Asia and Africa.
But Rasweiler says the focus of its aggregate centers will remain on U.S. soil. “We took a modular approach so we can deploy it in multiple locations across the U.S. We’ll get Raleigh up and running and expand across the U.S., and then we can think internationally,” he says. Rasweiler declined to comment on future locations or a concrete timeline for U.S. expansion, but he says American Tower will target secondary markets to supplement existing Tier 1 markets.
“We’re looking at what they call the top 100 U.S. markets,” he says. “We think these are the ones that come naturally to us. If we call the tier 1 markets that exist today primary centers, let’s call them primary centers, we are interested in secondary centers. “Raleigh definitely falls into that category, but Detroit, Houston, Pittsburgh, those types of markets are also what we’re looking at as natural extensions of those Tier 1 markets.”
