U.S. tower company Crown Castle completed the $8.5 billion sale of its fiber and small cells assets.

Crown Castle sold its fiber solutions business to Zayo Group Holdings, while EQT Active Core Infrastructure fund company Arium Networks snapped up the small cells assets.

The sale was first announced in March 2025 by Crown Castle as part of Crown's pivot to becoming a "pure-play" tower company.

Crown Castle said it will use a portion of the proceeds to repurchase $1 billion of shares under its stock repurchase program approved by its board of directors, as the company aims to reduce outstanding debt by more than $7 billion. 

"With the completion of the transactions, Crown Castle is now the only U.S.-focused, large publicly traded pure-play tower company and is well-positioned to become a best-in‑class operator in the world’s strongest wireless market," Crown Castle CEO Chris Hillabrant noted. "We believe this improved strategic focus enables greater customer alignment, faster decision‑making, and more disciplined execution across our high‑quality portfolio, accelerating our transformation and supporting long‑term shareholder value creation."

Crown Castle will focus on growing out its existing tower footprint across the U.S., which consists of more than 40,000 cell towers.

For Digital Bridge-backed Zayo, the acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber assets adds approximately 90,000 route miles of fiber to Zayo’s network and increases its overall reach to more than 40,000 on-net locations.

Zayo notes that this will help the company scale its national backbone, and enable "greater access into the data centers, cloud platforms, and AI ecosystems where bandwidth demand is growing fastest." The acquisition, which is also Zayo's largest to date, bolsters its fiber network to more than 224,000 route miles across North America.

“As AI is increasingly embedded in the global economy, bringing with it unprecedented connectivity needs, high-capacity fiber infrastructure has become indispensable,” Zayo CEO Steve Smith noted. “Zayo has been exclusively focused on building and operating fiber networks at scale for decades. That is why we are built for this moment and the right company to unlock the full value of these assets. This acquisition expands our ability to deliver capacity where it matters most and strengthens the critical fiber infrastructure powering today’s AI, cloud, and enterprise ecosystems."

Crown Castle's sale of its small cell assets to EQT led to the creation of Arium Networks, which has been set up as a standalone company that focuses on the deployment of small cells, in-building, and venue-based networks across the U.S.

EQT's acquisition of Crown Castle's small cells business means that Arium Networks kicks off with more than 100,000 on-air or under-contract small cells across 43 states.

These assets support the three main U.S. mobile network operators.

“Today marks an exciting milestone for our team and customers as we officially launch Arium Networks as an independent company,” Arium Networks CEO Laurent Therivel noted. “We are well-positioned to lead in the delivery of capacity and coverage where residents, businesses, and communities need it most. As a company dedicated to enhancing connectivity, we have the flexibility to invest in innovation, the focus to build lasting partnerships, and the solutions to deliver value to the communities we serve.”