Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper): status and timeline

Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper)

Low-earth-orbit satellite constellation for global broadband. Formerly Project Kuiper. Enough sats in orbit for beta by Q4 2026.

ScalingStage 5 of 5

398 launched, 396 in orbit as of July 2026. Beta launch autumn 2026. Full constellation 3,200 by 2029.

Updated 2 Jul 2026Checked 10 Oct0 updates this week

Milestones

Next · Initial service (beta) launch

Project Kuiper renamed to Amazon LeoNov 2025Complete.
First satellite launchedApr 2025Complete.
398 satellites launched2 Jul 2026Complete.
Initial service (beta) launchTarget Sep 2026Current milestone.
Commercial service launchTarget Q4 2026Not yet reached.
Full constellation deploymentTarget 2029Not yet reached.

Most important updates

Amazon successfully launches 29 more Leo satellites; 398 launched total, 396 in orbit; beta service launching autumn 20262 Jul 2026

Upcoming

Sep 2026Initial service (beta) launch (next)
Q4 2026Commercial service launch
2029Full constellation deployment

Current obstacles

Launch cadenceNeed launches for global coverage on schedule. Atlas V era ending; transition to other vehicles needed.
Space traffic and debrisThousands of new sats increase collision risk with debris and other constellations. Tracking critical.

Physics limits

LEO orbit decayLEO sats experience atmospheric drag and lose altitude. Regular reboosts or replacements needed.
Routing complexityMore sats improve coverage but increase complexity. Inter-sat links and gateways must be designed carefully.

How it works

3 parts

LEO constellation

Low-earth orbit coverage

Hundreds of sats in LEO provide coverage with low latency; signals travel shorter distance to ground.

ULA launches

Atlas V deployment

ULA Atlas V deploys satellite batches. Final Atlas V Leo mission launched July 2, 2026.

Global broadband

Remote and high-latitude coverage

Constellation covers areas underserved by terrestrial networks once fully deployed.

Spec sheet

Spec	Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper)
Launched by July 2026	398^R (reported)
In orbit by July 2026	396^R (reported)
Target full constellation size	~3,200 satellites^R (reported)

^R reported by the company

Update log

1 update

Thu 2 Jul

Major: Amazon successfully launches 29 more Leo satellites; 398 launched total, 396 in orbit; beta service launching autumn 2026PressHardware

About Amazon

The team behind Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper)

Amazon

Prime Air drones, AWS silicon, cloud computing, robotics

Amazon operates AWS, the world's leading cloud platform with custom AI accelerators (Trainium, Inferentia), quantum chips and servers. Amazon Robotics runs the largest robot fleet deployed. Prime Air delivers packages by drone.

AWS leads enterprise cloud with 1M+ deployed robots. Prime Air delivers to 500 US cities, hundreds of thousands of packages in 2026.
Custom silicon: Trainium/Inferentia accelerators, Graviton ARM CPUs, cat-qubit chips. Project Rainier (500k Trainium2) trains Claude.
Pieter Abbeel leads frontier model work, due re:Invent 2026. Kiro agentic IDE inverts coding: specs are source, code is artifact.

amazon.com (opens amazon.com)Company profile →

Founded: 199432 yrs
Headquarters: United States
Status: Public
Listed: AMZN (opens google.com)NASDAQ
Valuation: $2.1Tmarket capOct 2026
Staff: ~1,570,000Sep 2026
Works in: AviationDelivery dronesAIRoboticsSpaceflightQuantumComputing
Coverage: 8 programs · 7 updateslatest 1 Sep 2026checked 10 Oct
Customers: Anthropic (opens anthropic.com)GXO Logistics (opens gxo.com)
Partners: Caltech (opens caltech.edu)
Suppliers: United Launch Alliance (opens ulalaunch.com)
People: Pieter Abbeel (opens en.wikipedia.org)AI Researcher, Frontier Model ResearchAndy Jassy (opens en.wikipedia.org)CEOChris Weber (opens linkedin.com)VP of Leo Business

Spec

Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper)

Launched by July 2026

398^R (reported)

In orbit by July 2026

396^R (reported)

Target full constellation size

~3,200 satellites^R (reported)