This Week in Dual-Use by Sam Burrell

April 8, 2026 - Major developments in dual-use and defence tech.

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Amazon considers buying Globalstar to rival Starlink

In the latest episode of Musk vs Bezos, Amazon is reportedly in talks to buy Globalstar, an American low orbit satellite constellation, in a continuation of its bid to compete with Starlink. It is mulling a valuation of $9B. That seems quite cheap.

I wrote last week that Starlink is the jewel in the crown of SpaceX (which has recently increased its target IPO valuation to $2T). Amazon has been developing Amazon Leo for a few years already, but is behind. If this transaction goes through it will still struggle to catch up with Starlink. Largely because SpaceX is able to launch more satellites than Blue Origin.

There are moments in history when a company creates a new market through novel technology but the value is captured by a competitor. In 2008 Apple released the iPhone 3G which standardised GPS in smartphones. Then Google created a killer product with Google Maps and now I don’t know anyone who uses Apple Maps.

I suspect Starlink will win the race, such is its head start. But sometimes distribution trumps product. Presumably Bezos will make it possible to order a Globalstar terminal on Amazon Prime and pay your subscription at the click of a button. That would be very low friction.

Meanwhile Amazon has already done a deal with Delta to deploy Amazon Leo on Delta aircraft, starting in 2028. And British Airways just put Starlink on planes for the first time. It will be interesting to see how Eutelsat, Europe’s answer to Starlink, is able to compete.

DeepSeek v4 model will run on Huawei chips

DeepSeek's new v4 model ​will run on the ‌latest chips designed by Huawei. That is a coup for the Chinese Communist Party, which has been trying to wean its AI labs off NVIDIA chips.

For the past few years, the working assumption in Washington has been that cutting China off from NVIDIA’s most powerful chips would meaningfully slow its frontier model development. It has instead allowed NVIDIA to sell a less powerful variant, the H200, to China. The logic being that dependency is leverage.

DeepSeek v4 running on Huawei suggests that leverage may be eroding. Huawei’s chips are still behind NVIDIA on raw performance, particularly at the bleeding edge of training large models. But they are improving quickly, and more importantly, they are available.

I have previously written about why Russia has no chip industry to speak of. The short version is that while the US was building Silicon Valley, the USSR poured its resources into the KGB. The KGB then stole American chip designs and no meaningful Soviet chip industry was ever developed.

China is playing catch up to American dominance in chip design. The AI race is as much about industrial autonomy as it is about model capability. If China can sustain progress without access to best-in-class Western components, that will put it on even footing with the US.

Russia’s new FPV drone could extend its reach

Russia has unveiled a new fibre optic first-person-view (FPV) attack drone called the KVS, featuring a ring shaped wing design.

The ring-shaped wing design means the ends of the wing panels are connected to each other, eliminating traditional wingtips. This configuration should reduce the intensity of wingtip vortices and improve aerodynamic efficiency.

Its design is likely a bid to increase payload capacity and operational range. Although Russia pioneered the fibre optic FPV drone, its tethered nature limits its effectiveness at ranges beyond 10km. That is a drawback as the drone war continues to stretch away from the front lines in Ukraine.

As the article notes, the struggle is increasingly about who can strike deeper into the rear with drones, hitting vehicles, logistics, launch crews and resupply routes. Range is now the currency of advantage in the drone war.

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Samuel Burrell is a Partner at Expeditions, investing in the future of security in Europe.

His weekly newsletter covers developments in dual-use and defence technologies, picking out the changes in the sector, giving them context and analysis.