Amazon Leo, the Jeff Bezos-owned satellite Internet company formerly known as Kuiper, is seeking regulatory approval to operate in Kenya—and if granted, it will walk into a market where a rival has already been making moves. In March, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company is eyeing a mid-2026 launch for its Leo Internet services, likely to roll out first in the United States.
The company has applied for a Network Facilities Provider (NFP) Tier 2 licence, a permit to build and operate telecoms infrastructure across the country, from satellite-linked stations to fibre backhaul.
The licence spans 15 years, costs around $115,000 upfront, and comes with a local ownership requirement: at least 30% of the company must be held by Kenyan citizens within three years of approval. Kenya is attaching conditions that force companies to embed themselves locally, share ownership, and file rollout plans.
Why this matters: Traditional Internet infrastructure—the kind that connects most homes and offices—relies on fibre cables buried underground or mobile towers scattered across cities. It works well in dense urban areas, but it has always struggled to reach rural communities, remote towns, or places where the economics of building ground infrastructure simply don’t add up.
Satellite Internet solves that problem differently: instead of laying cables, it beams connectivity from space directly to a small dish at your home or office. The newer generation of these satellites—called low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites—orbit much closer to the planet than older satellites, which means faster speeds and lower latency. That’s the technology both Amazon Leo and Starlink, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are deploying.
Starlink got to Kenya first, and it has not wasted the head start. It is now Kenya’s eighth-largest Internet service provider, with over 22,000 subscribers. More telling: despite holding less than 1% of the overall market, Starlink dominates the high-speed segment, accounting for more than half of all connections above 100 megabytes per second (Mbps).
It got there through aggressive pricing—hardware rentals, installment payment plans—that lowered the barrier of entry in a market where upfront costs have historically kept people offline. Amazon’s approach has been more methodical. It secured a landing permit in Nigeria in January 2026, though commercial services haven’t launched there yet. Kenya is next on the list.
The bigger picture: Two of the world’s wealthiest men are now racing to connect Africa’s internet users from space, each backed by billions in capital and ambitions that extend well beyond the continent.