Jay A. Brown
President and Chief Executive Office at Crown Castle
Thanks, Dan, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on the call this morning. As you saw from our results last night, 2021 was a tremendous year for Crown Castle. We delivered 14% AFFO per share growth. We grew our common stock dividend by 11%. We benefited from the highest level of tower application volume in our history, resulting in a 35% increase in core tower leasing activity and a 6% -- and 6% organic growth, leading the industry by a wide margin.
We saw an inflection in the demand for small cells, securing commitments for more than 50,000 new small cells during the last 12 months, which is equal to 70% of the total small cells booked in our history prior to 2021. We entered into a new 12-year agreement with T-Mobile that provides committed long-term tower revenue growth, and we made significant progress towards our goal to achieve carbon neutrality for Scope one and two emissions by 2025 as we successfully sourced 60% of the total electricity we expect to consume this year from renewable sources.
These results reflect the positive fundamentals underpinning our U.S.-centric business, as our customers are busy upgrading and deploying their nationwide 5G network, resulting in robust activity across our towers and small cells from new installations and amendments. As we start 2022, we expect elevated levels of tower leasing to continue this year and anticipate leading the industry once again with the highest U.S. tower revenue growth, supporting our announced 11% dividend increase, which is well above our 7% to 8% target.
Our customers are also committing to the next phase of their 5G build-out that will require the deployment of small cells at scale to increase the capacity and density of their networks as more spectrum deployed across existing macro towers is not sufficient to keep up with the growth in mobile data demand. With that in mind, I believe 2022 will be an important transition year for our small cells and fiber business as we prepare to accelerate our deployment of small cells from the approximately 5,000 nodes this year, to what we expect will be more than 10,000 beginning in 2023.
Dan will cover the financial results for 2021 and our updated expectations for '22 in a bit more detail. So I'm going to focus my comments on our strategy to create significant shareholder value by providing profitable solutions to connect communities and people to each other. We are focused on delivering the highest risk-adjusted returns for our shareholders by investing in shared infrastructure assets that lower implementation and operating costs for our customers, while generating solid returns for our shareholders.
As a result, we continue to solely invest in the U.S. market because we believe it represents the best market for wireless infrastructure ownership with the most attractive growth profile and the lowest risk. Over the last 25 years, the performance of our tower assets has proven the value of this strategy. We began investing at approximately 3% yield. And today, those assets now yield more than 11%. We are building value from this strategy again with our small cell and fiber business.
Since the beginning of our small cells and fiber strategy, investors have had two primary questions. would small cells be required at scale and would customers co-locate on the same assets to drive attractive returns? Today, I believe these questions have been answered. At a time when our customers have been upgrading a record number of our tower sites for 5G, we secured commitments for more than 50,000 new small cell nodes. This is in addition to the 55,000 small cell nodes we have on air today.
Importantly, a significant portion of the 50,000 new nodes will be co-located on existing fiber assets at attractive returns. So clearly, we have very positive answers to these key questions. Small cells are required at scale and will be co-located on existing assets. As these small cells are deployed, they will contribute to improved network performance, which history has taught us, will attract additional small cells as carriers compete on network quality.
This dynamic is similar to our tower experience, where a significant driver of the value created has been from carriers deploying more spectrum on existing towers to keep pace with mobile data demand growth. As a result, I believe this is just the starting point for total small cells needed by wireless networks. This view is further supported by recent work completed for us by third-party experts that predict a long-term environment where small cells accelerate. As the clear leader in small cells, we are uniquely positioned to benefit from this growth.
The advancement of our small cells strategy continues to remind me of our journey as the U.S. tower industry developed, ultimately creating significant value for shareholders. Although it's easy to forget, there was significant investor skepticism during the early years when we were proving out the tower business. During that time, we faced questions about the long-term return potential of the business, the negative free cash flow profile and when or if ever, it would inflect and whether we would ever see customers co-locate on the same assets since each carrier had different spectrum portfolios and unique network requirements.
Those questions were eventually all answered for U.S. towers. But oftentimes, the turning points in the business that address those questions only became widely accepted after the fact. I see a similar pattern with our small cell business. I'm convinced that this period is one of the most important proof points for the small cell business model. We have more than $15 billion invested in more than 80,000 route miles of high-capacity fiber connecting 55,000 small cells that are on air and concentrated in the top U.S. markets.
The weighted average life of this capital is less than five years and already yields nearly 8%. Following the recent commitments for small cells, we have more than 60,000 contracted small cell nodes in our backlog, including a record number of colocation nodes that we expect will increase the overall yield on our invested capital. This sets us on a course to accelerate growth in our small cell business beginning in 2023 as we expect to deploy more than 10,000 small cell nodes next year, with the potential to scale from there.
We also continue to see opportunities to add to the returns we are generating from small cells by leveraging the same shared fiber assets to pursue profitable fiber solutions growth. We remain disciplined as we allocate capital to these opportunities with decisions driven by return targets, consistent with how we've executed our fiber strategy from the start, by focusing on small cells as the key driver of long-term value creation. So to wrap up, we had a terrific 2021. We expect to once again lead the industry with the highest U.S. tower revenue growth in 2022.
And we see the recent large-scale small cell commitments as the beginning of a thematic move in the deployment of future wireless networks, for which we are well positioned as the clear leader. I believe our strategy, capabilities and unmatched portfolio of more than 40,000 towers and more than 80,000 route miles of fiber concentrated in the top U.S. markets, put Crown Castle in the best position to capitalize on the current environment and to grow our cash flows and our dividends per share, both in the near term and for years to come.
Because of our position, Crown Castle provides an excellent opportunity for shareholders to invest in the development of 5G in the U.S., which we believe is the best market for communications infrastructure ownership, with this attractive growth and low-risk profile. Importantly, we provide this access to such attractive industry dynamics while delivering a compelling total return opportunity, comprised of a high-quality dividend that's currently yielding over 3%, with expected growth in that dividend of 7% to 8% annually.
And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dan.
