Amazon has installed a ground station for its Kuiper satellite fleet in Santander, Spain.

As reported by El Diario Montañés, the company has now placed infrastructure at the Santander Teleport of the Science and Technology Park of Cantabria. News that the cloud and e-commerce company had selected Santander as a satellite gateway location surfaced in February.

Erzia Technologies and MTN Satellite Communications signed a joint-venture agreement to build a new teleport in Santander back in 2010. The facility launched in 2011. FMC Globalsat acquired the site in 2022.

The Kuiper constellation is intended to eventually comprise 3,236 satellites, selling to consumers as well as enterprise and governments. More than 100 machines have been launched in orbit, with services due to launch this year.

To date, Amazon has signed deals for Kuiper with telecoms firms Vodafone and Vodacom, Verizon, NBN Co., Kazakhtelecom, and Vrio, as well as US airline JetBlue. An AWS deal with mining company Gold Fields mentioned using Kuiper for connectivity at its remote locations.

As well as Spain, the company is known to have ground station infrastructure at the National Space Centre in Cork County, Ireland, and has leased land in New Zealand for a ground site.

Amazon Web Services also has its own ground station-as-a-service offering, known as AWS Ground Station, which first launched in 2019.

AWS has ground station antennas at its regions in the US (Oregon, Ohio, Hawaii, Alaska), the Middle East (Bahrain), Europe (Stockholm, Ireland), Asia Pacific (Sydney, Seoul, Singapore), Africa (Cape Town), and South America (Punta Arenas in Chile).

AWS recently signed a ground station partnership with Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT). KSAT’s ground station network includes more than 40 locations hosting 200 multi-mission antennas worldwide.