Communications & Media

Communications Infrastructure Summit 2024 Key Takeaways

By: Michael Elias, Greg Williams CFA, Anton Rinnert, Cooper Belanger

Sep. 11, 2024

Guests: Brad Moline, President and CEO, ALLO Communications, Jack Waters, CEO, Intrepid Fiber, Jon Lin, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Services, Equinix and Andrew Schaap, CEO, Aligned Data Centers,

Hosts: Michael Elias, Communications Infrastructure Analyst, TD Cowen and Greg Williams, CFA, Cable, Satellite & Telecom Services Analyst, TD Cowen

We recently hosted our 10th Annual TD Cowen Communications Infrastructure Summit in Boulder, Colorado. The event included 45 speakers across the data center, tower and fiber sectors. Watch this episode of TD Cowen On The Road for insights on fiber-to-the-home and its role in wireless and wireline convergences, open access, data center demand and power constraints.

The Big Picture

We came away from this year's Communications Infrastructure Summit with the view that hyperscale data center demand remains strong. We see the potential for demand to accelerate in 2H24, which will likely drive further supply shortages and result in increased data center pricing.

Specific to towers, our conversations at the Summit point to green shoots for U.S. carrier activity with private tower operators indicating expectations for 2025 activity levels to be up versus 2024 levels, although the magnitude of the increase remains less clear.

On fiber, the pervasive topic was naturally around the US$5 billion GenAI fiber deals. We spoke with numerous parties on the deal specifics and came away reaffirmed that these deals aren't for everybody in that they provide high upfront non-recurring fees (with high upfront capex) but low revenue/EBITDA in the outer years.

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Michael Elias

Vice President, TMT - Communications Infrastructure Research Analyst, TD Cowen

Michael Elias
Vice President, TMT - Communications Infrastructure Research Analyst, TD Cowen

Biography

Michael Elias is a Vice President covering the Communications Infrastructure sector including Data Centers and Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s) and has been a member of the Communications Infrastructure team at TD Cowen since 2017.

Prior to joining TD Cowen, Mr. Elias worked as an equity analyst at Xanthus Capital Management. Mr. Elias received his B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research: Engineering Management Systems at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Greg Williams

Director, Equity Research, TD Cowen

Greg Williams
Director, Equity Research, TD Cowen

Biography

Prior to joining Cowen in 2012, Greg Williams worked in equity research for a top-ranked research team at JPMorgan and served as a senior analyst at Sidoti and Company. In addition, Mr. Williams has more than five years of telecom industry experience working in various corporate finance and strategy roles at AT&T. He received a BA degree with a double major in economics and computer applications from the University of Notre Dame and is a CFA charterholder.