Amazon has said its long-awaited satellite internet rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink will finally go live in “mid-2026”.

The chief executive, Andy Jassy, said in a letter to shareholders that the technology company was “on the verge of launching Amazon Leo” and had secured “revenue commitments from enterprises and governments” for the scheme.

Originally conceived in 2019 as Project Kuiper before being renamed last year, Leo now has 200 low-orbit satellites in space, with Jassy promising “a few thousand more” in the years to come.

While on track to make Leo the second commercial satellite presence in space, the plans would still leave it far behind SpaceX’s Starlink, which has nearly 10,000 satellites in space and aims to have as many as 42,000 operational in the future.

Jassy promised Leo would incorporate the successful Amazon Web Services cloud computing software into its function, writing: “Leo will seamlessly integrate with AWS to enable enterprises and governments to move data back and forth for storage, analytics, and AI.”

He also said Delta Air Lines had named Leo as its future onboard wifi provider and would begin using it on 500 planes in 2028. Jassy said Delta would be joining “other Leo customers like JetBlue, AT&T, Vodafone, DIRECTV Latin America, Australia’s national broadband network, Nasa, and others”.

As well as being some years behind rivals such as Starlink and OneWeb, Amazon’s efforts to join the internet space race have also been hampered by having to rely on competitors’ rockets for launches, though plans have been announced for Blue Origin, also owned by Jeff Bezos, to take primary responsibility for launching Leo satellites from 2027 onwards.

The rivalry between Amazon and Space X, and by extension their owners, is expected to shape the coming decades of the commercial space industry, with Bezos and Musk both eager to set up datacentres in orbit as well as being interested in normalising commercial space travel, a field where Bezos’s Blue Origin has the edge.

It remains to be seen whether Leo will join Alexa, Audible and the Kindle as one of Amazon’s successful ventures into other fields, or noteworthy failures such as the Fire phone, which was launched in 2014 and lasted little over a year before being discontinued, and Amazon Fresh, which closed all of its brick-and-mortar UK and US stores between 2025 and 2026.