Amazon CEO Andy Jassy didn’t mention Elon Musk’s Starlink, or Eutelsat’s OneWeb, or Canada’s Telesat Lightspeed or any of the ever-growing list of would-be low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellite constellations in remarks on Amazon’s Q2 analysts call. But he did say that Amazon’s Project Kuiper would be one of only two major players in LEO.
Jassy said he that as Kuiper is deployed, there will be only “two players” with the modern technology in LEO satellites.
He stated that Kuiper would provide a “very compelling” customer proposition in terms of price.
Jassy added that that Kuiper would address Amazon’s key customer segments of consumers, enterprises and governments, and would tie in with AWS. He stated that Kuiper had already signed an impressive number of agreements with enterprises and governments.
He explained his rationale, saying: “If you think about enterprises and governments, a lot of what they want to do when they take the data down from space is they want to put it into the cloud to do analysis, analytics, AI, and various operations on top of it. The fact that Project Kuiper and AWS are so seamlessly connected is very attractive to enterprises and to governments.”
This coming Thursday (August 7th), Kuiper will have another batch of satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Jassy told analysts that while it had suffered delays with some of its rocket launch providers he remained hopeful that Kuiper would begin “commercial beta-tests” later this year or early in 2026.
