In a landmark move that marks the tech giant’s entry into the African satellite internet market, Amazon announced Wednesday during a public event in Cape Town that its low-orbit satellite internet service Amazon Project Kuiper (branded as Amazon Leo for local rollout) is scheduled to go live in South Africa in 2027, putting it on track to beat rival SpaceX-owned Starlink to operational launch in Africa’s most industrialized economy.
The Seattle-based e-commerce and space technology firm founded by Jeff Bezos has entered a partnership with local South African internet service provider Herotel to roll out the new connectivity service across the nation of 62 million people. This agreement stands as Amazon’s first official satellite internet partnership on the African continent, though no financial terms of the deal were disclosed to the public at the time of the announcement.
The announcement comes amid a high-profile public standoff between Starlink CEO Elon Musk, a South Africa native, and the South African government over the country’s regulatory requirements. Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual, has publicly claimed that South African regulations have blocked Starlink’s entry solely because he is white, leveling unsubstantiated accusations of institutional racism against the national government. Musk’s complaints center on the country’s long-standing affirmative action policies, which mandate that foreign firms operating in the communications sector allocate a minority share of their local operating entities to Black and other previously disadvantaged non-white South African owners as a condition of securing an operating license.
These policies were crafted to redress the systemic economic exclusion that non-white South Africans endured under decades of apartheid white minority rule, a system that stripped Black and indigenous communities of access to business ownership, economic opportunity and basic infrastructure. In a show of official support for Amazon’s deal, South African Communications Minister Solly Malatsi joined representatives from Amazon and Herotel for the official announcement, signaling the government’s backing for the project that complies with national regulatory frameworks.
Beyond the South African launch, Amazon confirmed that this agreement is just the opening phase of a broader continental rollout strategy. The company has also announced a separate partnership with Vanu Inc., a Lexington, Massachusetts-based firm that specializes in expanding mobile connectivity access across developing nations, to support its expansion across other African markets in coming years.
SpaceX’s Starlink, which pioneered modern low-orbit satellite internet, launched its first operational satellites back in 2019 and currently operates more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, with active service already rolled out in roughly two-dozen other African countries. However, Musk’s refusal to comply with South Africa’s affirmative action ownership rules has left Starlink locked out of the South African market, creating a window of opportunity for Amazon to establish an early foothold.
Amazon entered the low-orbit satellite race later than Starlink, launching its first batch of operational satellites just last year, but has already built up a constellation of more than 390 operational satellites in low Earth orbit, with thousands more scheduled for launch in the coming years to deliver global coverage.
The African continent represents a massive untapped market for satellite internet providers, with a total population of more than 1.5 billion people. A large share of the population lives in rural and underserved remote areas where traditional fixed-line broadband infrastructure has never been built out, creating widespread unmet demand for reliable high-speed internet connectivity.