In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s Project Kuiper satellite venture will be “a very large revenue opportunity” in the future — but he’s hedging his bets as to exactly when that future will be.
Eventually, Project Kuiper aims to provide satellite broadband service to hundreds of millions of people around the world who are currently underserved when it comes to connectivity. Such a service would compete with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, which already has more than 2.6 million customers.
Amazon is investing more than $10 billion to get Kuiper off the ground. The plan calls for sending 3,232 satellites (down slightly from the originally planned 3,236) into low Earth orbit by 2029. Under the terms of the Federal Communications Commission’s license, half of that total would have to be deployed by mid-2026.
When Project Kuiper’s first two prototype satellites were launched last October for testing, Amazon said that its first production-grade satellites were on track for launch in the first half of 2024, and that it expected broadband service to be in beta testing with selected customers by the end of the year.
Today, Jassy put a slightly different spin on that schedule. “We’re on track to launch our first production satellites in 2024,” he wrote in his letter. “We’ve still got a long way to go, but are encouraged by our progress.”
Jassy amplified on those remarks in an interview with CNBC. “The first big production pieces will be the second half of ’24, and we expect to have the service up in the next year or so,” he said.
Amazon has reserved dozens of launches with Blue Origin (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ privately funded space venture), plus United Launch Alliance (which sent up the prototype satellites on its Atlas V rocket) and the Europe-based Arianespace consortium (which is gearing up for the first launch of its Ariane 6 rocket). The company also struck a deal with SpaceX for three Falcon 9 launches.
Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology at Project Kuiper, told GeekWire last November that his team had already identified the launch vehicles for the first production-grade satellites. “In the near future, we’ll start disclosing our launch plans — who we’re launching with, which rockets,” he said. “We have a couple of options to start off with, but we’ve narrowed it for our first year, what we want to do. And we’ll share that information in the days to come.”
Though it seems likely that United Launch Alliance will handle the next launch, no formal announcement has yet been made. An Amazon spokesperson told GeekWire today that there were no updates on the timing of the launch.
When Project Kuiper is up and running, the first users are likely to be the organizations with which Amazon is partnering on network development. Those organizations include telecommunications companies (Verizon, Vodafone and Vodacom, NTT and Sky Perfect JSAT) as well as NASA, DARPA and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.
In his letter, Jassy noted that Project Kuiper’s applications wouldn’t be limited to at-home customers. He said broadband services would also be offered to “governments and enterprises seeking better connectivity and performance in more remote areas.”
Amazon plans to integrate satellite broadband into its other product lines, most likely starting with Amazon Web Services. Back in November, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said “the possibilities for consumers are enormous, but so are the benefits to companies and governments.”
“With Project Kuiper’s enterprise-ready private connectivity services, you will be able to move data from virtually anywhere over private, secure connections, and use these connections to reach your data in the AWS cloud,” Selipsky said at the AWS re:Invent conference.
It’s not hard to imagine synergies with Prime Video as well. In his letter, Jassy said “we have increasing conviction that Prime Video can be a large and profitable business on its own.” Bundling Project Kuiper’s broadband service with Prime Video’s content could make both opportunities for profit loom even larger.
