Crown Castle

Crown Castle Inc. is a real estate investment trust (REIT) and the nation's premier provider of shared wireless communications infrastructure in the United States. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Crown Castle owns and operates the country's largest portfolio of cell towers, with over 40,000 towers and approximately 90,000 route miles of fiber supporting small cells and fiber systems across major U.S. metropolitan areas. The company serves as a critical infrastructure partner to major wireless carriers, enabling the delivery of wireless coverage and capacity for mobile networks, including 4G LTE and 5G technologies.

Founded in 1994 with an initial portfolio of just 133 Houston-area cell towers, Crown Castle has grown through strategic acquisitions and organic development into a Fortune 500 company with a market capitalization of approximately $39 billion. The company's business model is built on providing shared infrastructure solutions that allow multiple wireless carriers to locate their equipment on the same tower or fiber network, creating operational efficiencies and reducing environmental impact compared to each carrier building separate infrastructure. This approach has made Crown Castle an essential part of the wireless telecommunications ecosystem in the United States.

Crown Castle operates as a REIT, a structure it adopted in 2014 when it had approximately 40,000 towers. The REIT structure allows the company to avoid corporate income taxes while distributing the majority of its taxable income to shareholders through dividends. For fiscal year 2024, Crown Castle reported total site rental revenues of $6.358 billion, though the company recorded a net loss of $3.903 billion primarily due to a $5.0 billion goodwill impairment charge related to its Fiber segment. Despite this accounting charge, the company maintained adjusted EBITDA of $4.16 billion and adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) of $3.04 billion.

In March 2025, Crown Castle announced a strategic transformation to focus exclusively on its core tower business. The company signed definitive agreements to sell its fiber solutions business to Zayo Group Holdings and its small cells business to EQT Active Core Infrastructure for a combined $8.5 billion. This divestiture represents a return to the company's roots and core competency—tower infrastructure—positioning Crown Castle as a pure-play U.S. tower company. The company expects to use the proceeds to repay debt and fund a $3 billion share repurchase program while maintaining investment-grade credit ratings. With this strategic repositioning and new leadership under CEO Christian Hillabrant, Crown Castle is focused on delivering sustainable returns to shareholders while continuing to provide the essential wireless infrastructure that connects communities across America.