AMERICAN TOWER CORP /MA/ (AMT): what the price requires
At today's price, AMERICAN TOWER CORP /MA/ (AMT) is priced for +0.2% FFO growth. boothcheck doesn't publish a fair value or a price target; it shows what the price assumes, so you can judge whether that bar is too high.
Generated: 2026-07-14 · Exported: 2026-07-16 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/AMT
Headline
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticker | AMT |
| Company | AMERICAN TOWER CORP /MA/ |
| Current price | $169.58/sh |
| Composition | U.S. & Canada 84% / Data Centers 16% |
What The Price Requires (Inversion)
The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Inversion basis | reit |
| Implied FFO growth | 0.2% |
| Price-to-FFO | 16.9x |
| FFO yield | 5.9% |
Solve inputs: computed at a 8.8% cost of equity with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage; each 1pp of cost of equity moves the implied growth ~4.5pp.
How unusual the bet is: within-range (limited comparison data)
| Reference | Value |
|---|---|
| vs own history | -0.66σ |
| cohort percentile (of 88 peers) | 67 |
Valuation X-Ray
The price is justified by relative-multiple; asset-based/earnings-power land below the price.
How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.
| Family | Median price/FV | Models | Reads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asset | 1.94x | 4 | expensive |
| Earnings | 2.78x | 5 | expensive |
| Relative | 1.21x | 6 | expensive |
| Growth | 1.36x | 4 | expensive |
Families that justify the price: Relative Families that call it expensive: Asset, Earnings
The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 8.2%); the inversion above states its own rate.
Per-Model Detail (n=19)
| Model | Family | FV | Price/FV | Applicable | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DCF Perpetual Growth | Growth | $125.17 | 1.35x | yes | FCF base $3.8B, growth 3% (input: historical growth), terminal g 3.1%, WACC 8.2%, 5yr projection |
| DCF Exit Multiple | Growth | $147.06 | 1.15x | yes | Exit EV/EBITDA: 16.9x / 18.9x / 20.9x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull), 5yr |
| Relative Valuation | Relative | $234.88 | 0.72x | yes | P/E 27.78x (blended: static sector reference 35x + trailing (TTM) 17x), scenarios: 23.5x / 27.8x / 32.1x (bear / base = reference held flat / bull), EV/EBITDA 20x |
| Simple DDM | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Two-Stage DDM | Growth | $124.97 | 1.36x | yes | Stage 1: 4% for 5yr, Stage 2: 3.5% perpetual |
| Simple Excess Return | Asset | $69.67 | 2.43x | yes | BV/sh $7.55, ROE (TTM) 85.4%, ke 9.3% |
| Two-Stage Excess Return | Asset | $379.36 | 0.45x | yes | 5yr excess ROE then converge to ke=9.3% |
| Discounted Future Market Cap | Growth | $114.87 | 1.48x | yes | Rev $10.8B, growth 3% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 6.2x / 7.3x / 8.5x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x) |
| Peter Lynch Fair Value | Relative | $120.12 | 1.41x | yes | FFO/share $10.01, growth 4% (input: historical FFO/share growth, 10y median), PEG=6.58 (Overvalued) |
| Margin Trajectory | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Earnings Power Value | Earnings | $59.54 | 2.85x | yes | Normalized EBIT (5y avg op income, one-time charges added back) $3.97B × (1−14%) / WACC 8.2% → EPV (no growth) |
| Residual Income | Asset | $116.80 | 1.45x | yes | BV $7.55 + 5yr PV of (ROE (TTM) 85.4% − Kₑ 9.3%) × BV; BV grows 8.8%/yr |
| Graham Number | Asset | $41.22 | 4.11x | yes | √(22.5 × FFO/share $10.01 × BVPS $7.55) — Graham's conservative floor |
| EV/EBITDA Relative | Relative | $180.57 | 0.94x | yes | EBITDA $4.83B × sector EV/EBITDA 20.0x |
| FCF Yield | Earnings | $60.93 | 2.78x | yes | FCF $3770.8M / Kₑ 9.3% — zero-growth perpetuity |
| SBC-Adj FCF Yield | Earnings | $56.78 | 2.99x | yes | SBC-adj FCF $3.59B (FCF $3.77B − SBC $0.18B) capitalized at Kₑ |
| Ben Graham Formula | Earnings | $138.42 | 1.23x | yes | FFO/share $10.01 × (8.5 + 2×4.0%) × (4.4 / 5.3%) |
| ROIC-Justified P/B | Asset | $6.22 | 27.26x | yes | BV $7.55 × (ROIC 6.7% / WACC 8.2%) (excluded from median) |
| P/Sales Sector | Relative | $139.06 | 1.22x | yes | Revenue $10.82B × sector P/S 6.0x |
| PEG Fair Value | Relative | $60.05 | 2.82x | yes | FFO/share $10.01 × (PEG 1.5 × growth 4.0% (input: historical FFO/share growth, 10y median)) → PE 6.0x |
| Earnings Yield | Earnings | $108.22 | 1.57x | yes | FFO/share $10.01 / required return 9.3% (Rf 4.3% + ERP 5.0%) |
| Funds From Operations Multiple | Relative | $141.89 | 1.20x | yes | FFO/share $10.01 × 14.2x P/FFO (route cohort median, n=85); FFO $4.67B (FFO incl. D&A + impairments, FY2025, companyfacts), shares 467M |
| Clinical Phase NPV | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Merton | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| V5 Mechanical | — | — | — | no | — |
Solvency
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Fixed-charge coverage (FFO basis) | 4.4x |
| Funds from operations (trailing) | $4.7b |
| Share count CAGR (dilution) | 0.5% |
| Burning cash | no |
REIT basis: leverage is read against funds from operations (FFO), not depreciation-gutted operating income. The header's implied growth runs on ADJUSTED FFO — FFO minus recurring maintenance capex — so the header's multiple and this leverage ratio use bases that differ by that capex; neither substitutes for the other. Net debt could not be resolved from the corporate debt tags in the filings (REIT notes and mortgage debt are often tagged outside the corporate ladder), so the leverage ratio is withheld rather than rendered from incomplete tags.
Bullet Takeaways
- American Tower rents space on communications towers to wireless carriers under long-term leases with built-in escalators, about 84% of revenue, and runs a CoreSite data-center business, about 16%, that is now its fastest-growing piece.
- The clearest risk is the balance sheet typical of a tower REIT: the business is built on large, long-dated debt, and management itself flags that leverage and debt-service obligations can constrain the company, especially as notes refinance at higher coupons.
- What to watch is the data-center inflection: cash revenue there grew 17% on cloud and AI demand, and full-year 2026 adjusted funds-from-operations guidance of roughly $10.90 to $11.07 per share is the test of whether that growth offsets slower tower leasing.
Bull Case
The tower moat is one of the best in real estate, and it comes down to who already occupies the structure. A tower is expensive to build and faces local zoning that makes a second one nearby hard to permit, so once a carrier hangs equipment on American Tower's steel, the economics favor adding the next carrier to the same tower rather than building elsewhere. That co-location is pure margin: the incremental tenant costs almost nothing to add but pays nearly full rent. The leases lock in growth on top of that. The filing notes that escalations "tied to CPI or another inflation-based index are considered variable lease payments," which means a meaningful share of the rent rises automatically with inflation, giving the revenue base a built-in upward drift no leasing team has to negotiate each year.
The data-center business is the growth engine the tower base now funds. The filing describes a portfolio "of highly interconnected data center facilities and related assets in the United States" positioned to monetize demand for hybrid and multi-cloud computing, and the recent results show it inflecting: data-center cash revenue grew 17%, driven by hybrid and multi-cloud installations and AI-related use cases, with interconnection activity at CoreSite reaching what management called an inflection point. Interconnection is the stickiest, highest-margin part of a data center, because once a customer's network is cross-connected to dozens of others inside a facility, moving out means rebuilding all of it. The segment is small today but compounding fast, and it sits on the same skill American Tower already has: owning critical infrastructure and renting it to tenants who cannot easily leave.
The overall results show both engines working. First-quarter 2026 revenue rose 6.8% to $2,738 million, adjusted EBITDA grew 5.2% to $1,835 million, and adjusted funds from operations reached $2.84 per share, with the company raising its full-year outlook. For a REIT, raising AFFO guidance early in the year is the signal that the recurring, contracted revenue base is performing ahead of plan, and that the data-center acceleration is more than offsetting the maturing U.S. tower market.
Bear Case
The structural vulnerability is leverage, and it is the company's own stated risk rather than an outside critique. American Tower is built on a large stack of long-dated debt, and the filing places its "leverage, debt service obligations and repurchase activity" among the risks related to its financial performance. A tower REIT funds its assets with borrowing because the cash flows are predictable, but that model is acutely sensitive to interest rates: as existing notes mature, they refinance at prevailing rates, and the filing's own debt schedule shows recent issuance carrying coupons in the high-4% to mid-5% range. Every refinancing at a higher rate is a permanent drag on the funds from operations that the dividend and the valuation rest on. In a higher-for-longer rate world, that drag compounds quietly each year.
The tower side of the business is maturing, which puts more weight on the data-center bet than the headline growth suggests. The U.S. carrier market is consolidated and the heavy build-out phase of past network upgrades is behind it, so domestic tower leasing grows slowly now. That is why the funds-from-operations growth the price implies is only about 1.3% a year, and why even a small AFFO-per-share decline excluding foreign-exchange effects in the most recent quarter is worth noting: the core tower engine is no longer doing the heavy lifting. The bull case increasingly depends on data centers, which are a different, more competitive, more capital-hungry business than towers, with the filing itself noting the data-center model "contains certain differences from our business model for our tower leasing operations."
The valuation leaves little room for either pressure to bite. The price sits in the upper half of the REIT group on price-to-AFFO, and the asset-value and earnings-power lenses both read it as expensive; only the relative-multiple and growth methods justify it. That means the price already credits the data-center acceleration and the inflation escalators, while assuming rates do not keep grinding up the refinancing cost. A REIT priced toward the top of its peer group, funded by debt that reprices higher over time, with its largest segment maturing, is exposed on exactly the variable it cannot control: the cost of the capital that underpins the whole structure.
Valuation
A tower REIT is valued on its adjusted funds from operations, the cash earnings plus property depreciation minus the recurring capital it takes to keep the assets leasable, not on an operating multiple. At about 19 times AFFO, the price implies American Tower grows that cash-earnings stream only around 1.3% a year. Against its own record that pace is well within reach, but against its REIT peers the multiple sits in the upper half of the group, which is the tell: the market is paying a premium price for modest forward growth, betting that the quality of the contracted revenue and the data-center acceleration justify the spot near the top of the cohort.
The methods we use to triangulate split the way a premium-priced REIT usually does. The asset-value lens reads the price well above the depreciated value of the towers and facilities, and the earnings-power lens reads it as expensive against current cash earnings. Only the relative-multiple and forward-growth lenses reach the price, the latter by crediting the data-center growth and the inflation-linked escalators that lift the revenue base over time. When the static methods say expensive and the forward-looking ones defend the level, the price is a quality-and-growth premium: the market is paying up for the durability of co-located tower leases and the optionality of the data-center inflection, not for cheapness.
Solvency is the load-bearing question and belongs in the close, even though the exact leverage ratio is best left unstated here, because tower-REIT debt is structured across notes and mortgage facilities that resist a single clean number. What matters is the direction: the business is debt-funded by design, the recent notes carry coupons in the high-4% to mid-5% range, and the company itself flags leverage and debt service among its principal risks. The share count has been essentially flat, so the capital structure is being managed through debt rather than equity issuance. The decisive fact is not the modest AFFO growth the price requires; it is that a premium-multiple REIT carrying large, repricing debt is most exposed to the rate environment, and the price assumes that environment cooperates while the data-center engine scales.
Catalysts
The first-quarter 2026 print was strong enough to lift the full-year outlook. Revenue rose 6.8% to $2,738 million, adjusted EBITDA grew 5.2% to $1,835 million, net income jumped to $879 million, and adjusted funds from operations reached $2.84 per share, with the company raising guidance. For the full year, American Tower now targets property revenue of roughly $10.66 billion and AFFO of about $10.90 to $11.07 per share, having nudged its attributable AFFO outlook higher.
The catalyst that matters most is the data-center inflection. Cash revenue in the segment grew 17% on hybrid and multi-cloud installations and AI-related demand, and management described interconnection activity at CoreSite reaching an inflection that is prompting aggressive capacity expansion. That is the growth lever the premium valuation increasingly leans on, since domestic tower leasing is mature. The watch list is therefore the pace of data-center revenue and interconnection growth, the capital spending required to expand that capacity, and the trajectory of refinancing costs as the company's debt matures and reprices, since the rate on that debt feeds straight into the AFFO the price is built on.
Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)
Data Centers (reported)
- EQIX (EQUINIX INC)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- DLR (DIGITAL REALTY TRUST, INC.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- IRM (IRON MOUNTAIN INC)
- (no filing in the citation store)
Core business (reported)
- CCI (CROWN CASTLE INC.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- SBAC (SBA COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- EQIX (EQUINIX INC)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- DLR (DIGITAL REALTY TRUST, INC.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- PLD (Prologis, Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- WPC (W. P. Carey Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- INVH (Invitation Homes Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- AVB (AVALONBAY COMMUNITIES, INC.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
Methodology Note
- Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
- Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
- Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
- Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.
Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.
Sources
AMT Q1 2026 results, 8-K · AMT Q1 2026 results and earnings call, April 2026 · AMT Q1 2026 earnings call, April 2026