World's largest tower company builds momentum behind GSMA Tower Forum
June 24, 2026, Shanghai: At MWC Shanghai, the GSMA announced today that China Tower has joined the GSMA as a new member, bringing the world's largest telecom tower company into the GSMA global ecosystem. Last year, China Tower completed a nationwide upgrade across China, converting its 5.6 million base stations and 2.1 million towers into intelligent edge computing centers to meet the needs of the AI era.
Tower companies are playing an increasingly strategic role as operators prioritize network resilience, energy efficiency and the infrastructure foundations needed to support next-generation connectivity. China Tower's membership creates further momentum behind the GSMA Tower Forum, a new initiative that convenes mobile network operators and tower companies to collaborate in areas including energy efficiency, policy and permitting and technological evolution, with a focus on practical outcomes that improve deployment, performance and resilience.
The GSMA Tower Forum is structured around four main areas of activity: knowledge exchange, industry outreach, advocacy and technology and innovation. These activities include research and benchmarking on topics including sustainability and energy, as well as joint engagement through events and outreach. Additional focus areas also include modernizing policies around energy access and permitting, technology roadmaps, and best practice guidelines for digitalization and AI inference in networks.
As demand for AI-enabled services and AI-native network operations accelerates, infrastructure providers are evolving beyond traditional “grass and steel” assets toward intelligent platforms that can host adjacent computing capabilities, deliver resilient power, and enable new forms of edge intelligence. China Tower is advancing this transformation at scale, including deploying digital towers powered by 5G, AI and big data models and developing hundreds of AI algorithms to support operational and monitoring use cases.
“This year, the GSMA has recently created the Tower Forum, creating a platform for tower operators from around the world to collaborate and exchange ideas. This initiative is of great importance for the advancement of a new digital and intelligent global infrastructure. Through this Forum, China Tower is ready to deepen cooperation with global partners in technological innovation, standard setting, security governance, and the integration of digital and real economies. We will jointly strengthen the new digital and intelligent infrastructure and march hand in hand into a new intelligent era.”said Zhang Zhiyong, president of China Tower.
“We are delighted to welcome China Tower to the GSMA. As the demands of the AI era intensify, infrastructure is becoming a strategic differentiator, not only for coverage and capacity, but also for power, resilience and the ability to support new adjacent computing requirements. China Tower's experience and scale will provide valuable insight to operators and the broader GSMA community, and we look forward to working together through the GSMA Tower Forum to build more productive infrastructure partnerships across the ecosystem.”said Vivek Badrinath, CEO of GSMA.
Tower infrastructure companies and related companies interested in shaping this agenda are encouraged to join the GSMA and participate in the GSMA Tower Forum, which will help ensure that the passive infrastructure layer of the industry is fully represented in the next era of mobile and AI-driven connectivity.
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About the GSMA
The GSMA is a global organization that unifies the mobile ecosystem to discover, develop and deliver critical innovation for positive business environments and social change. Our vision is to unlock the full power of connectivity so that people, industry and society thrive. Representing mobile operators and organizations across the mobile ecosystem and adjacent industries, the GSMA offers its members three broad pillars: connectivity for good, industry services and solutions, and outreach. This activity includes advancing policy, addressing today's biggest societal challenges, supporting the technology and interoperability that make mobile devices work, and providing the world's largest platform to convene the mobile ecosystem at the MWC and M360 series of events.
We invite you to learn more at gsma.com
About the Chinese Tower
About China Tower (Stock Code: 0788.HK) China Tower is the world's largest telecommunications tower infrastructure service provider and the company always adheres to the philosophy of shared development and implements the “One Core and Two Wings” strategy. The Company is mainly engaged in the construction, maintenance and operation of base station auxiliary facilities, such as telecommunications towers, public network coverage in railway and underground tunnels, and large-scale indoor distributed antenna systems (DAS). Meanwhile, drawing on unique resources to provide society with energy application services such as information applications, intelligent battery swapping and power backup, the Company strives to become a world-class integrated digital infrastructure service provider and a highly competitive new energy and information application provider. At the end of 2025, the company's total assets amounted to RMB 336,579 million. China Tower operated and managed 2.119 million towers in 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions of the People's Republic of China, serving more than 3.856 million tenants with a leasing ratio of 1.79.
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