- AT&T committed to investing $250B over five years to expand “always-on” fiber, wireless and satellite networks
- Analyst Roger Entner said this is a huge investment for AT&T, which already allocates more capex than Verizon or T-Mobile
- AT&T also plans to hire “thousands” of new technicians in 2026
AT&T is doubling down on its network with a new $250 billion commitment that aims to accelerate fiber broadband, wireless and satellite deployments.
The announcement, which coincided with the 150th anniversary of the first telephone call, states AT&T will spend that $250 billion over the next five years to build “always-on connectivity” that supports AI, cloud computing, autonomous applications and other “data-heavy” services.
It’s unclear how much of the $250 billion will be spent annually, but according to Barron’s the figure is way higher than the $113.6 billion in capital expenditures that analysts have projected for the same period.
For context, AT&T reported $20.8 billion capex for full-year 2025 and $20.3 billion in 2024.
It’s also uncertain if $250 billion includes grant money, such as the roughly $1.03 billion AT&T won from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. Fierce reached out to AT&T requesting additional details, and will update the story if we hear back.
If AT&T evenly divides the $250 billion, that comes to about $50 billion per year – more than double its previous capex spend. “This is huge,” said Recon Analytics Principal Roger Entner. “That’s 5x T-Mobile. That’s 3x Verizon.”
Verizon and T-Mobile in 2025 spent about $17 billion and $10 billion in capex, respectively, to build out their networks. The former is notably reducing capex to $16-16.5 billion in 2026 as new CEO Dan Schulman attempts a financial turnaround.
AT&T is doubling up on spending after making a few big acquisitions in the past year, such as $23 billion in EchoStar spectrum, Lumen’s fiber-to-the-home business for $5.75 billion and a $1.02 billion agreement to buy spectrum licenses from the former USCellular.
CEO John Stankey is also a staunch supporter of the Trump Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which prompted AT&T to ramp its annual fiber expansion to an additional 1 million locations. Today’s announcement notes, “the current tax and regulatory environment are the most conducive to such investment in decades.”
AT&T closed 2025 with more than 32 million fiber passings and is targeting 60-plus million locations by 2030.
Additionally, AT&T said it plans to hire “thousands of technicians in 2026 alone” and invest more in training and development, including “AI fluency.” The move comes after the company laid off at least 5,000 employees in 2025 and ended its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The operator in its announcement also emphasized its partnership with AST SpaceMobile to expand satellite coverage as well as its FirstNet emergency services network. AT&T intends to work with AST to cover hard-to-reach FirstNet locations.
But the question is how AT&T and AST plan to compete with SpaceX and T-Mobile’s direct-to-device (D2D) partnership. Entner in a recent satellite research report stated AST is “significantly behind” on satellite deployments with only a handful in orbit, whereas SpaceX is slated to launch another 7,500 satellites to add to its 9,400-count fleet.