Cellnex, which has become Europe’s largest tower owner through a series of acquisitions, will replace the CEO who drove its recent growth.
“The current economic and financial context demands that we open a new chapter in Cellnex’ story,” said CEO Tobias Martinez, in a press release. It is now time for Cellnex “to be led by a person with a time horizon that extends beyond December 2024, at which time my contract ends,” he added. Martinez is currently expected to leave Cellnex in June. The board did not share details about who might replace him.
Cellnex was carrying roughly $18.42 billion (€17 billion) in debt as of November 2022. At that time the company said its focus would shift from expanding its tower assets to improving its credit rating.
Cellnex has amassed a portfolio of 138,000 towers in 12 countries. Germany is a major market that Cellex has not been able to penetrate; the company tried to buy control of Deutsche Telekom’s towers last year, but those assets went to Brookfield Infrastructure Partners and DigitalBridge.
Cellnex and Vapor IO
In addition to its tower portfolio, Cellnex controls a fiber network. It will leverage both these assets in a new partnership with Vapor IO, a Texas company working to leverage fiber and cell tower locations to deploy a grid of neutral host edge compute nodes.
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Vapor IO and Cellnex said in a press release their first deployment will be in Barcelona, and they plan to expand to other European cities. They hope to give carriers, cloud service providers and enterprise customers an efficient way to process and analyze data closer to the places it is generated. This will be especially important to companies that operate in multiple European countries and need to comply with data sovereignty laws.
The companies named real-time computer vision for public safety, smart retail, industrial robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical imaging and online gaming as target use cases for Vapor IO’s edge compute nodes.
“It is expected that in the coming years there will be an explosion in applications and services that require computing in places physically closer to the end user, which implies an increase in the demand for this type of infrastructure,” said Eduardo Fichmann, global director of innovation and product strategy at Cellnex, in a statement.
Vapor IO’s hardware and software will be deployed at small edge data centers provided by Cellnex at tower sites, the companies said. The edge data centers are meant to support workloads deployed by multiple tenants, extending the tower neutral host model.
“Vapor IO's Kinetic Grid is both cloud-neutral and carrier-neutral, meaning it is one of the few locations at the edge where both carriers and clouds can meet on equal terms,” stated the company’s CEO and founder Cole Crawford.
The companies said fiber owned by Cellnex or its mobile operator partners will connect the data centers. They also plan to connect the Barcelona data centers to Vapor IO’s U.S. infrastructure, starting with Chicago and Dallas. Vapor IO recently illustrated its network connections.
