中立營運商市場追蹤報告（2025 年第四季）：人工智慧驅動的資料中心將取代鐵塔，成為該產業成長的引擎。

Carrier-neutral Operator Market Tracker, 4Q25: Data Centers Displace Towers as the Sector's Growth Engine, Powered by AI

出版日期: 2026年07月23日 | 出版商:

MTN Consulting, LLC | 英文 | 訂單完成後即時交付

價格

簡介目錄

本報告檢驗了中立運營商網路營運商 (CNNO) 市場的成長和發展，追蹤了 2011 年第一季至 2025 年第四季全球 47 家 CNNO 的各項財務統計資料。

2025年標誌著這個成熟市場的漸進式轉捩點。 2024年成長停滯，而2025年營收成長3.6%至1,014億美元，全年成長加快，第四季年增8.5%。資本支出（CAPEX）成長11.3%至438億美元，創近年來最快成長速度。截至2025年底，淨有形固定資產（PP&E）達到2,807億美元（年增8.3%），員工人數成長9.0%至約120,600人。這一成長主要得益於Uniti和Windstream的合併。推動這一成長的因素有兩個：一是人工智慧對資料中心容量的需求，二是併購活動的復甦擴大了產業的基礎。

在MTN顧問公司追蹤的三大營運商細分市場——通訊業者、超大規模資料中心業者營運商和超大規模資料中心業者中，CNNO市場規模最小，但其位置介於兩者之間。通訊業者早已通訊業者了完全垂直整合的模式。到2026年，通訊業者將採用自有資產和租賃資產結合的方式建構網路。多年來，通訊業者的資本支出（CAPEX）轉化為營運支出（OPEX）。超大規模資料超大規模資料中心業者對CNNO的依賴則恰恰相反。儘管他們在2025年的資本支出超過5000億美元，但他們仍然租賃了大部分光纖和相當一部分資料中心容量。這種雙重依賴關係正是CNNO產業的優勢所在。它既能從通訊業者資產所有權的轉移中獲利，也能從超大規模資料中心超大規模資料中心業者基礎設施建設速度不足的現狀中獲利。雖然企業和政府也是基本客群的一部分，但主要收入來源仍然是通訊業者和超大規模資料中心業者。

資產重組是該產業的常態。成功的核電運營商已經建立了可重複的收購公司和單一設施、快速整合以及創造規模經濟和交叉銷售機會的方法。

本報告重點在於真正「中立」的業者（CNNO），即主要客戶與主要股東不重疊的業者。中國鐵塔不符合此標準，因為其前三大客戶均為中國通訊業者，而這些業者同時也是其控股股東。然而，鑑於中國鐵塔的規模以及中國獨特的網路生態系統，本報告仍將其納入考量。報告通篇指出，中國鐵塔對整個產業整體數據造成的扭曲。

調查範圍

本次市場分析涵蓋以下公司：

21Vianet
American Tower
Arqiva
Balitower
Bharti Infratel
ByteDance
Cellnex
China Tower
ChinData
Chorus Limited
Cogent
CoreSite Realty
Crown Castle
CyrusOne
Cyxtera
Databank
Digital Realty
DigitalBridge
DuPont Fabros
EI Towers
Equinix
GDS Data Centers
GTL Infrastructure
GTT Communications
Helios Towers
IBS Towers
IHS Towers
Internap
Interxion
Inwit
Keppel DC REIT
Level 3
Lumos
NBN Australia
NEXTDC
QTS Realty
SBA Communications
SMN (Protelindo)
STP Towers
Summit Digitel
Sunevision
Superloop
Switch
TDF Infrastructure
Telesites
Telxius/Telefonica
Tower Bersama
Uniti Group
Zayo

簡介目錄

Product Code: GNI-23072026-1

This report reviews the growth and development of the carrier-neutral network operator (CNNO) market, tracking a wide range of financial stats for 47 CNNOs across the globe, from 1Q11 through 4Q25. 2025 marked a modest inflection point for this mature sector. After a flat 2024, revenues rose 3.6% to $101.4 billion (B), with growth accelerating through the year to +8.5% YoY by 4Q25. Capex climbed 11.3% to $43.8B, the fastest expansion in years. Net PP&E ended 2025 at $280.7B (+8.3% YoY), and headcount reached roughly 120,600 (+9.0% YoY, inflated by the Uniti-Windstream merger). Two forces drove growth: AI-related demand for data center capacity, and a revival of M&A that expanded the base of the sector.

The CNNO market is the smallest of the three operator segments tracked by MTN Consulting, alongside telco and hyperscale, but it sits at the center of both. Telcos long ago abandoned the fully integrated model; the telco of 2026 assembles its network from a mix of owned and leased assets. Years of tower, fiber, and data center divestitures have shifted a growing share of the world’s physical network infrastructure into CNNO hands, usually with leaseback provisions that convert telco capex into opex. Hyperscalers lean on CNNOs from the opposite direction: despite spending over $500B on capex in 2025, they still lease most of their fiber and a meaningful share of their data center capacity. This dual dependence is the CNNO sector’s advantage – it monetizes both the telcos’ retreat from asset ownership and the hyperscalers’ inability to build fast enough. Enterprises and governments round out the customer base, but telcos and hyperscalers remain the revenue anchors.

Asset reshuffling is constant in this sector. The best CNNOs have made a repeatable discipline of acquiring companies or discrete facilities, integrating them quickly, and extracting scale economies and cross-selling opportunities. This study focuses on the purely ‘neutral’ operators – those whose key customers do not also show up as key shareholders. China Tower fails that test, as its top three customers (the Chinese telcos) are its majority owners; we include it anyway, given its sheer size and China’s unique networks ecosystem, but the report flags its distorting effect on sector totals throughout.

Our figures are built bottoms-up from companies that are publicly traded now, or were public in the recent past; purely private players that report no audited financials cannot be credibly tracked. That boundary matters more than ever, because the AI capex boom is happening disproportionately on the private side. The largest data center transaction on record – the $40B purchase of Aligned Data Centers by a BlackRock/GIP, MGX and AI Infrastructure Partnership consortium (whose backers include Microsoft and Nvidia), announced in October 2025 – sits entirely outside our database, as does most of the record ~$52B of data center M&A completed in 2025. The boundary may shift in our favor, however. OpenAI and Anthropic filed confidential IPO prospectuses in June 2026, and China’s DeepSeek, fresh off a funding round at a ~$71B valuation, is preparing to file in late 2026 or early 2027, with plans to build its own data centers and AI chips. Every AI-linked listing brings audited numbers, and a piece of the private buildout, into public view, and eventually into databases like this one.

Below are some highlights from the report:

Revenues: CNNO revenues reached $101.4B in 2025, up 3.6% from 2024, a five-fold expansion from the ~$20B market of 2011. More telling than the annual figure is the trajectory within the year: growth ran below 1% YoY in 1H25, then jumped to +4.7% in 3Q25 and +8.5% in 4Q25. Both organic and inorganic drivers explain the acceleration. The organic driver is AI: data center revenues grew 11% in 2025, with QTS (+35%), ChinData (+27%), and VNET/21Vianet (+21%) posting the sharpest gains. The other driver is M&A: Uniti’s August 2025 absorption of Windstream single-handedly returned the bandwidth segment to growth (+7%). Towers, still the largest segment, slipped 1.2%. That’s partly a reporting artifact, as Crown Castle moved its fiber and small cells units to discontinued operations ahead of their $8.5B sale to EQT and Zayo (closed May 2026).

Five CNNOs generated over $5B in 2025 revenues: China Tower ($14.0B), American Tower ($10.6B), Equinix ($9.2B), Level 3 ($6.5B), and Digital Realty ($6.1B). Crown Castle, a ~$7B-revenue company two years ago, has left this club as it converges on a pure-play US tower model, while American Tower’s fastest-growing asset is its CoreSite data center unit (+14% in 2025). The sector’s center of gravity is visibly moving from towers to data centers.

Capex: CNNO capex hit $43.8B in 2025 (+11.3%), lifting capital intensity to 43%. Equinix used its xScale JV with GIC and CPP Investments to deliver record 2025 capacity (90+MW of xScale space, 23,250 retail cabinets); VNET (21Vianet) delivered a record 404MW of wholesale capacity against surging Chinese AI demand, with another 450-500MW planned within 12 months; PE-owned QTS spent an estimated $5.9B on capex, more than most CNNOs earn in revenue. Several operators are also investing in power infrastructure alongside new data center capacity to secure electricity for future AI deployments, extending the current investment cycle and delaying returns on capital.

Profitability: the sector’s average net margin jumped to 10.9% in 2025 from 3.0% in 2024. But this gain overstates reality, as merger accounting and other one-time items inflated 2025 net profit. Free cash flow margin, the more honest gauge, improved modestly to 6.9% from 6.3%, and held up despite the 4Q25 capex surge. Balance sheets, however, are re-leveraging: total debt rose 9.7% to $261.5B against $26.1B of cash, putting net debt near $235B. Asset sales remain the deleveraging tool of choice: Crown Castle is directing proceeds from its $8.5B fiber/small cells sale to a >$7B debt reduction and a $1B buyback, and more such divestitures are likely as interest rates stay elevated and CNNOs seek capital to pursue AI-related opportunities.

Employees: headcount rose 9% to about 120,600 in 2025, but this is consolidation, not hiring. Uniti’s merger with Windstream imported a telco-scale workforce into the sector. That also diluted the CNNO sector’s standout productivity metric: revenue per employee slipped to ~$840K in 2025 from ~$885K in 2024. Historical trends suggest this increase is temporary. CNNOs rationalize acquired workforces once integration is complete, so expect headcount to drift back down and productivity to recover over 2026-27.

Energy: energy intensity keeps climbing: the average CNNO consumed 879 MWh per $M of revenues in 2025, from 833 in 2024 and 555 in 2019. This tracks the data center segment’s rising share of sector revenues. The spread across the sector is extreme. DigitalBridge (4,371 MWh/$M, estimated), GDS (3,960), and QTS (3,575) sit at the top; tower specialists sit near the bottom. As AI workloads scale, energy access is becoming a competitive differentiator, and a key reason CNNOs and their PE backers are investing directly in power supply. They are also developing new fuel sources. Equinix, for instance, sees nuclear energy as a “promising solution” to power data centers, and is working with Oklo, Radiant, UCL-Energy and Stellaria.