Amazon’s $11B Acquisition in the Race to Space

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On April 14, Amazon agreed to buy Globalstar for $90 a share, $11.57B in total. Globalstar is a leading mobile satellite service (MSS) operator founded 35 years ago. As part of the deal, Amazon will acquire the satellite operations, infrastructure, and the spectrum licenses. In combination with Amazon’s satellite internet service, Leo (previously Project Kuiper), this will enable global coverage, even in more remote areas and between traditional cell networks.

The business is slated to launch more than 3,200 satellites, but is currently hovering around 200. In comparison, Starlink currently operates over 10,000 satellites.

The acquisition closes in 2027 pending regulatory approval and certain milestones. Amazon announced a parallel deal to carry Apple’s iPhone and Apple Watch features on Amazon’s Leo constellation. Apple also holds a 20% stake in Globalstar from its $1.5B investment in 2024. They invested to ensure Globalstar could expand its network to support certain iPhone features. This makes them simultaneously the announced retail customer on Amazon’s new constellation and seller.

On April 14, IonQ announced it had entangled qubits across two independent trapped-ion quantum computers using photons. This work was partly funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory. It also landed a U.S. defense research contract through DARPA’s Heterogeneous Architectures for Quantum (HARQ) program. These announcements led to a 20% jump in their stock price.

Frontier quantum efforts usually hit the same wall. More qubits can be packed onto a single chip, but errors and complexity grow faster.

By successfully linking two separate machines using light particles, IonQ demonstrated that you can potentially scale quantum much like we scale the modern internet. Connecting smaller, reliable units into a massive, coordinated network. The key breakthrough was finding a way using commercial machines on standard commercial fiber.

“Scaling quantum computation beyond the limits of a single chip is essential for realizing a future quantum internet.” - Niccolo de Masi, CEO of IonQ

Even though it was a demo rather than long-distance networking, modular quantum computing continues to advance.

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