American Tower’s AMT subsidiary, Coresite, recently launched native 400 Gbps (400G) Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect at its Chicago data center campus. This positions it as an ideal location for high-bandwidth, performance-intensive workloads like enterprise and AI applications, as well as the GPU-optimized neocloud providers tailored for large-scale AI training, inference and agentic automation.
CoreSite customers in data-intensive industries are reaping the benefits of 400G connectivity. For instance, a leading cybersecurity provider uses AWS 400G Direct Connect to handle massive data volumes and speed up real-time threat analysis. Meanwhile, financial services companies are exploring 400G to deliver the speed and reliability required for latency-sensitive trading and quantitative research.
In addition to offering 400G AWS Direct Connect in CoreSite’s Chicago market, the data center campus provides dense fiber access and high-density colocation capacity. These capabilities enable customers to accelerate hybrid IT modernization and operationalize AI at scale. Through direct interconnection, customers achieve data replication savings of up to 70% and avoid data egress costs when restoring data from certain local cloud availability zones.
With this launch, CoreSite now hosts three locations with 400G AWS Direct Connect, including at its Chicago, IL; Santa Clara, CA; and Reston, VA data center campuses.
Management Commentary
Per Juan Font, president and CEO of CoreSite and SVP of American Tower, “The AI economy developing within CoreSite’s data centers demands a high level of interoperability between enterprises, AI applications, neoclouds and public cloud providers. Enabling native 400G AWS Direct Connect at CoreSite’s Chicago campus gives our customers the unique ability to establish low-latency, high-bandwidth data pipelines that deliver consistent performance, enhanced security and seamless integration across their digital environments.”
Conclusion
American Tower's CoreSite gains a competitive edge by launching 400G AWS Direct Connect in the Chicago data center campus, joining Santa Clara and Reston. This attracts high-value customers and accelerates revenue growth in the booming AI infrastructure market.
With growth in cloud computing, the Internet of Things and Big Data, and an increasing number of companies opting for third-party IT infrastructure, data center companies are experiencing a booming market. To capitalize on the growing opportunity, American Tower is also focusing on expanding its data center footprint.
Over the past month, shares of this Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) REIT have gained 1.7% compared with the industry’s rise of 1.9%.
Image Source: Zacks Investment ResearchStocks to Consider
Some better-ranked stocks from the broader REIT sector are Digital Realty Trust DLR and Prologis PLD, each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) at present. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for DLR’s 2025 and 2026 FFO per share is pinned at $7.35 and $7.91, respectively. This calls for year-over-year growth of 9.5% for 2025 and 7.6% for 2026.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for PLD’s 2025 and 2026 FFO per share is pegged at $5.80 and $6.08, respectively. This implies year-over-year growth of 4.3% for 2025 and 4.7% for 2026.
Note: Anything related to earnings presented in this write-up represents funds from operations (FFO) — a widely used metric to gauge the performance of REITs.
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American Tower Corporation (AMT): Free Stock Analysis Report Prologis, Inc. (PLD): Free Stock Analysis Report Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (DLR): Free Stock Analysis ReportThis article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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