SES-Intelsat: Europe's answer to U.S. and Chinese space dominance

July 17, 2025 will be marked as a key date in the history of the space industry. On that day, SES, the Luxembourg satellite telecommunications giant, closed the acquisition of Intelsat for 3,500 million euros, thus consolidating the largest sector integration operation in space since the merger of Boeing and Hughes in the 90s. With this move, SES not only doubled its fleet to 120 active satellites, but also positioned itself as the main player in the planet's orbital infrastructure, combining geostationary (GEO) and medium (MEO) orbits in a single, dominant network. The message was clear; The old spatial order, fragmented among dozens of operators, is dead; a transatlantic oligopoly has been born with headquarters in Luxembourg and eyes on the stratosphere.

The operation, however, was not only financial. Behind the numbers is a geostrategic narrative that transcends the balance sheet. For SES, buying Intelsat wasn't simply about growing; was to ensure survival in a world where digital sovereignty is decided in space. After the war in Ukraine, Europe discovered that it relied on 60% non-European satellite capacity for military and emergency communications. Ka-band's reliance on U.S. satellites and Chinese infrastructure became a national security risk. The merger, therefore, was presented to EU governments as an "act of technological independence"; to create a continental champion capable of competing with SpaceX, Amazon and the Chinese giants, and to ensure that Europeans' critical data never again travels through other people's networks.

The business plan that accompanies the acquisition is as ambitious as the size of the debt incurred. SES announced that it will invest between 600 and 650 million euros per year until 2028, a record figure in the industry, to scale its MEO constellation from "tens to hundreds" of satellites. The third generation of O3b mPower, with 13 satellites already in orbit and 17 more in woodworking, promises latencies of less than 150 ms and throughput of terabits per second, enough to replace fiber optics in regions where installing cable is impossible or dangerous. But the real revolution is in hybrid architecture; each MEO satellite will act as a router in the sky, interconnected with 50 terrestrial gateways and 5 telemetry stations, creating a ring network that surrounds the planet and can be reconfigured in minutes based on demand.

Behind the engineering is a deeper vision: to become the "cloud of space." SES wants governments, military fleets, airlines and ships to buy not "megahertz" but "guaranteed services"; a broadband capacity that is deployed as if it were an Amazon Web Services API. To this end, it is developing an orchestration platform based on artificial intelligence that predicts peaks in demand, reassigns frequencies and changes coverage without human intervention. The goal is for a NATO contingent in the Sahel to be able to request symmetric 2 Gbps with NATO RESTRICTED encryption and have them operational in 90 minutes, as long as it takes a C-17 aircraft to take off from Ramstein. War is no longer just terrestrial; The first battleground is latency.

The geopolitical dimension is made explicit in the framework contract signed with NATO's Transformation Command in Norfolk. SES committed to providing 30% of the partner's satellite capacity for reconnaissance, drone and tactical communications missions, progressively replacing the old contracts with Inmarsat and Viasat. In return, Luxembourg – a country that owns 16% of SES – obtained a permanent seat on the alliance's space defence working group, something unprecedented for a state of 650,000 inhabitants. The move reproduces the model of the Baltic countries, which translated their investments in NATO infrastructure into political influence, but taken to the extreme; a micro-state that controls a critical orbital asset can exercise a veto over multinational operations.

Europe, for its part, has embraced fusion as the hard core of its ambitious IRIS² programme, the sovereign broadband constellation that will complement Galileo and Copernicus. Brussels will inject €2.4 billion into PPP (public-private partnership) and SES will provide the orbital infrastructure, spectrums and gateways. The preliminary design includes 170 satellites in LEO and 30 in MEO, managed by a joint operations center in Redu (Belgium) and a cybersecurity center in Torrejón (Spain). The mandate is clear; no bit of a European citizen can be routed by constellations not subject to the GDPR or the EU sanctions framework. IRIS² will not only compete with Starlink; it aims to replace it within the European Economic Area.

The impact on global competition will be brutal. SpaceX, which already controls 60% of the launch market and 45% of commercial satellite capacity, will face a rival with its own fleet, priority spectrum in the ITU and political backing from 27 states. Jeff Bezos, whose Kuiper constellation has yet to launch a single operational satellite, will have to negotiate with SES for access to European gateways if it wants to offer service on the continent. China, for its part, is nervously watching as its Hongyun project loses appeal in emerging markets that can now opt for a European one "without geopolitical conditions". The race for space is no longer a matter of engineers but a game of diplomatic chess.

Within the EU, the merger has sparked a quiet scramble over the location of terrestrial data centers. Germany is pushing for IRIS²'s main gateway to be installed in Cottbus, near Intel's future microchip factory, creating a "digital corridor" between semiconductors and satellites. France is proposing Kourou, in Guiana, to take advantage of the equatorial latitude and synergies with Arianespace. Spain offers the Morón base, with its new European Aerospace Command operations centre. The final distribution will determine which country will absorb the 12,000 high-skilled jobs and the 600 million annually in maintenance contracts. Orbital geopolitics begins on Earth.

The risk, however, is the concentration of power. A single consortium will control 38% of the C-band spectrum in the EMEA region and 55% of the global MEO. The European Commission's regulators imposed in return the transfer of 250 MHz of frequencies and the opening of four gateways to alternative operators, but digital rights NGOs warn of the possibility of an "information blackout" if SES suffers a cyberattack. The response has been to create a "resilience fund" of 500 million, financed by the company itself and by the European Investment Bank, to develop a parallel network of small satellites in LEO that can be activated in 48 hours. It is the first time that the EU has imposed orbital insurance as a condition of fusion.

Five months after the closure, the effects are already being felt. The day after the takeover, the European Council approved the Space Act which states that all autonomous cars and connected trucks sold in the EU must use European constellations for critical safety services. The standard, which comes into force in 2027, guarantees SES-Intelsat a captive market of 30 million vehicles. Meanwhile, in the sky, the first seven O3b mPower 3.0 satellites raised their orbit and began transmitting at 120 Gbps each, illuminating from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. In Luxembourg, the Minister of Economy sums up the move with a phrase that sounds like an epitaph from the old world: "The 21st century will not be won by those who have the most oil, but by those who control the routers that orbit at an altitude of 8,000 km."