Blue Origin Booster Lands but Satellite Fails, Nebius’ $46B Deals Raise AWS Competition
Blue Origin’s New Glenn booster achieved a successful reusable landing after a 10-minute ascent but failed to insert AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 into its intended orbit. Nebius, a Yandex spin-off, secured $46 billion in AI cloud service contracts with Microsoft ($19.4 B) and Meta ($27 B) through 2031, highlighting intensifying AWS competition.
1. New Glenn Booster Reuse Milestone and Orbital Deployment Failure
The New Glenn rocket’s reusable booster, dubbed “Never Tell Me the Odds,” completed its third flight and achieved a successful touchdown roughly ten minutes post-launch, demonstrating reuse capability. However, the upper stage underperformed, placing AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 into a lower-than-planned orbit, delaying deployment of a satellite intended for a space-based cellular broadband network similar to AWS’s Project Kuiper.
2. Nebius Secures $46 Billion AI Cloud Backlog
Nebius Group, spun off from Yandex in 2024, has amassed a contracted backlog of $46 billion in AI cloud services—$19.4 billion from Microsoft and $27 billion from Meta—extending through 2031. With 2025 revenue of $530 million, a $41 billion market cap, and plans to expand capacity to 800 MW–1 GW by end-2026, Nebius’s growth and Nvidia’s $2 billion strategic investment underscore rising competition for AWS.