Array Digital Infrastructure is the tower company left behind after Telephone and Data Systems sold its wireless operations to T-Mobile - an 81.9%-owned subsidiary, freshly renamed from its former USM common-share incarnation and now trading on the New York Stock Exchange as AD. Its fiscal second quarter, which ended June 30, 2026, arrived with three stories colliding: a $1.0 billion spectrum sale to Verizon that closed on June 1, an $11 per-share special dividend paid on the back of it, and a pending non-binding proposal from TDS to acquire the roughly 18% of Array it does not already own. There are two ways to read the quarter. The first reads as a profit explosion: net income attributable to Array shareholders reached $358.7 million, diluted earnings per share $4.15, versus $0.36 a year earlier. The second reads as what the income statement is actually showing - a one-time gain on selling spectrum, not an operating turn. Array booked a $409.8 million pre-tax gain on license sales and exchanges in the quarter, overwhelmingly the Verizon sale, and that single line explains most of the reported profit within continuing operations.
Strip the gain and the underlying business is a genuine but young tower story: site rental revenue grew 95% to $53.2 million, Adjusted EBITDA rose 56% to $56.2 million, and tower tenancy grew sequentially. The company owns 4,456 towers across 19 states and leases the space to a concentrated group of wireless carriers, principally T-Mobile, which agreed last year to lease a minimum of 2,015 towers for 15 years plus roughly 1,800 towers on an interim basis that will fade by January 2028. The tension of the quarter is the gap between the reported profit, which is largely a recycling of spectrum capital, and the durable asset underneath - a small, still-scaling tower portfolio whose value the market is pricing near its 52-week low. The decisive questions are whether the tower business can grow tenancy and site rental sustainably, whether the roughly $1.6 billion of retained spectrum on the balance sheet converts into further cash, and whether TDS's take-private proposal resolves at a premium that captures the minority's value.