Bloomberg News reported on Thursday that SpaceX is in talks with cellular infrastructure companies to secure access to at least 80,000 cell sites across the United States, citing people familiar with the matter. The agreements, if struck, would firm up the company's path toward building a fourth nationwide wireless carrier alongside AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.
The tower talks include Crown Castle, one of the country's biggest tower owners. Asked on the company's earnings call on Wednesday about possible leases with SpaceX and Amazon, chief executive Christian Hillabrant said Crown Castle was talking to "all parties" but declined to discuss specific customers. SpaceX, Crown Castle, American Tower and Vertical Bridge did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.
The 80,000 figure is about half of the 158,500 purpose-built cell towers operating in the U.S. last year, according to the Wireless Infrastructure Association. Crown Castle runs about 40,000 U.S. towers, American Tower has about 42,000 U.S. sites and privately held Vertical Bridge owns around 18,000. TD Cowen estimated that building a nationwide terrestrial network would cost more than $80 billion and take many years plus billions more in spending.
The towers are the ground half of a network SpaceX has been assembling all month. On October 8 it agreed to buy a nationwide portfolio of up to 14 MHz of paired 800 MHz low-band spectrum, a deal expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval. A day earlier, the FCC approved 15,000 next-generation direct-to-cell satellites for Starlink Mobile. Announcing the spectrum deal on X, Musk called it "the last critical piece of the spectrum puzzle needed for SpaceX to provide complete phone coverage in America," adding: "Very big deal." On the company's earnings call this week he said, "We will be building out our terrestrial networks so there's broad-based connectivity anywhere that SpaceX and Starlink are allowed to operate," and that satellite launches plus the spectrum acquisition "will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US."
The report rattled the incumbents in after-hours trading: AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile fell between 4.2% and 5% on Thursday evening, while Crown Castle jumped about 9% and American Tower added around 5%.
Today SpaceX sells a satellite phone layer through T-Mobile's T-Satellite service, running on about 650 satellites at around 4 Mbps — a coverage layer for texts and dead zones. Satellites alone cannot match the capacity of a dense ground network in cities, where building penetration and heavy user loads demand towers. That is the gap the 80,000 sites would fill.
