American Tower (NYSE: AMT) and Qualcomm Technologies (NASDAQ: QCOM) have established a strategic collaboration to support the tower company’s goal to “advance network architecture and accelerate near-edge applications,” reports Data Center Dynamics.
American Tower acquired data center operator CoreSite in 2021, Inside Towers reported. But the towerco also has plans for edge computing deployments. It is currently evaluating six edge colocation facilities that it operates at tower sites in Pittsburgh, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Austin, Denver, and Boulder.
Under the partnership initiative, system integrator Xingtera will install a 2U Arm-based server XT-iES865-80 at American Tower’s edge data center located in Denver. Qualcomm said the 2U server incorporates 80 Qualcomm QCS8250 chipsets that support the Android operating system and enable mobile ecosystem partners and developers to create and deliver edge computing applications.
Built in 2020, the Denver edge data center facility at 5041 Broadway is 360 sq ft in size with a power capacity of 100kW for eight equipment cabinets comprising 20 quarter-cabinet lockers and three full cabinets. American Tower says the site is a local interconnection and colocation facility that offers a secure and reliable hosting environment for its customer’s IT requirements.
In its 4Q22 earnings call, the company reiterated that it is considering more than 1,000 sites that could support 1MW edge data center locations.
“We believe the combination of CoreSite and American Tower’s platform of distributed tower real estate positions us to enhance the value of our existing assets as the edge proliferates,” said Tom Bartlett, American Tower President & CEO, during the call.
He added, “We still have, as you would expect, a significant amount of [work] around what the edge will ultimately look like. We have created an advisory board. We have a lab set up. We have plans to start to look at building out some of that capacity. … [With] the relationships that we’ve been able to develop through CoreSite with the cloud, we remain optimistic about what that opportunity is going to look like and how we’re going to be able to drive incremental business to our tower site, which is in and of itself has a strong competitive barrier given the ownership that we have of the land and of the site.”
Under the partnership, Qualcomm said it aims to “build and deploy a new class of scalable computing resources at the near-edge,” targeting edge use cases such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 5G, cellular Vehicle-To-Everything (CV2X), and autonomous system operations.
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