Amazon has agreed to buy satellite operator Globalstar for about $11.6 billion—the deal is set to bolster the tech giant’s ambitions to build its own orbital infrastructure.
According to a company statement released on Tuesday, Globalstar shareholders are being offered either $90 in cash per share or 0.32 Amazon shares, valued at no more than $90 per share. The offer represents a 23.5% premium to Globalstar’s Monday closing price. The transaction is expected to close in 2027.
Trading in Globalstar shares was halted after the announcement, while Amazon stock rose 1.1% in premarket trading in New York.
Amazon is developing its own low-Earth-orbit satellite network—Amazon Leo—in an effort to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Its Starlink project, which continues to grow rapidly, already has more than 10 million active users and about 10,000 satellites in orbit. This year, Starlink’s revenue is expected to exceed $9 billion.
Demand for satellite internet is rising sharply, especially in hard-to-reach regions, but Amazon is still lagging behind its own plans—the company had intended to deploy more than 7,700 satellites. It has already asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to ease or postpone the deadline requiring it to place 1,600 spacecraft into orbit by July.
The acquisition of Globalstar could accelerate those plans, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst John Davies notes, since the company already has an operational satellite network. Yet its infrastructure is far smaller in scale than Starlink’s and is primarily geared toward providing connectivity for phones and other devices in areas with weak coverage. Globalstar’s network, in particular, powers Apple’s emergency connectivity feature on the iPhone.