Amazon’s Globalstar Acquisition Changes More Than Satellite Internet

Last week, Amazon (AMZN) announced it will buy satellite service provider Globalstar (GSAT) – the company behind Apple's iPhone Emergency SOS feature and a key player in satellite spectrum – for close to $11.6 billion.

The obvious takeaway is that Amazon aims to become a major player in the direct-to-device satellite internet market.

But the more interesting insight, the one that we think matters more for investors, is that Amazon just acquired the infrastructure prerequisite layer for running data centers in space. And it did so before SpaceX went public and before Musk got tens of billions of dollars to start launching his own orbital compute nodes at scale.

A new tech titan has entered the orbital compute arena. The race is on – and so is the clock for investors.

This post originally appeared at InvestorPlace.