Amazon's $11.6B Bet on Direct-to-Device: What It Means for Carriers

Amazon is acquiring Globalstar for $90 a share — about $11.6 billion, a 23.5% premium over Globalstar's prior closing price. In one transaction, Amazon Leo picks up 24 operational satellites, a global ground station network, and Globalstar's S-band spectrum licenses. Amazon has also filed for approval to launch 5,105 additional satellites dedicated to direct-to-device connectivity, targeting deployment starting in 2028. Separately, Amazon and Apple have a standing agreement for Leo to continue powering iPhone and Apple Watch satellite features, including Emergency SOS — meaning Amazon is already embedded in one of the most widely deployed consumer satellite features on the market before this deal even closes.

The timing isn't incidental. Telecom operators have spent the past year worried that Starlink shifts from a coverage-gap partner into a direct competitor for mobile, broadband, and enterprise revenue. Amazon is positioning Leo as the alternative to that outcome: a satellite network built to extend carrier relationships rather than replace them, layered with fixed broadband, mobile backhaul, enterprise connectivity, and AWS underneath all of it.

That last part is the one operators should sit with. Partnering with Amazon may genuinely protect the customer relationship that Starlink threatens to disintermediate. It may also trade one hyperscaler dependency for another — with AWS sitting underneath the connectivity layer the same way it already sits underneath much of the compute layer for a large share of the internet. The capital funding this satellite build is the same capital funding AI data centers. That's not a coincidence; it's the same balance sheet making the same kind of infrastructure bet twice, in two different domains, and both bets terminate in Amazon owning more of the stack that carriers depend on.

The deal still has to clear regulatory approval and satellite deployment milestones, with closing expected in 2027 — 58% of Globalstar shareholders have already approved it via written consent, so the shareholder question is settled even if the regulatory one isn't. That gives operators roughly a year to decide how they want to engage before the infrastructure is live.

Operators evaluating this shouldn't frame it as a straightforward vendor choice between Amazon and SpaceX. They should ask which dependency they can actually negotiate the terms of. Starlink competes with carriers directly for the end customer. Amazon Leo, on paper, doesn't — but only for as long as Amazon decides that arrangement serves its interests better than competing directly does. Contracts get renegotiated. Strategic incentives shift faster than infrastructure gets replaced.

Which dependency would your organization rather manage: the one that's openly competing with you today, or the one that's currently choosing not to?

Sources: CNBC, About Amazon, CNBC satellite filing

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