Amazon cloud unit kills Snowmobile data transfer truck eight years after driving 18-wheeler onstage
Amazon Web Services Snowmobile Truck
CNBC
At Amazon’s annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd’s attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage. Andy Jassy, now Amazon’s CEO, called it the Snowmobile, and said the company would be using the truck to help customers speedily transfer data to Amazon Web Services facilities.
Less than eight years later, the semi is out of commission.
As of March, AWS had removed Snowmobile from its website, and the Amazon unit has stopped offering the service, CNBC has confirmed. The webpage devoted to AWS’ “Snow family” of products now directs users to its other data transport services, including the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized device that can be equipped with fast solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone.
An AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company has introduced more cost-effective options for moving data. Clients had to deal with power, cooling, networking, parking and security when they used the Snowmobile service, the spokesperson said.
“Since we introduced Snowmobile in 2016, we’ve released many other new services and features which have made migrating data to AWS even faster and easier for our customers,” the spokesperson wrote.
An AWS Snowmobile truck appears in a Seattle parking lot in 2019.
Andrew Evers | CNBC
Snowmobile was priced at $0.005 gigabytes per month, not including other costs, according to a page formerly on the AWS website. For a company with 100 petabytes of data — the capacity of a Snowmobile — a transfer job would cost about $500,000 per month.
Amazon’s decision to axe Snowmobile comes as Jassy implements cost cuts across the company to contend with lackluster sales growth. Amazon has slashed more than 27,000 jobs since late 2022 and has discontinued projects in the devices and retail units. The cuts have continued this year, with Amazon laying off hundreds of jobs in AWS earlier this month.
While it’s fairly routine for AWS and rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to get rid of products and services, the elimination of Snowmobile stands out due to the splashy way it was introduced at the company’s showcase Reinvent conference in Las Vegas in late 2016.
Jassy, who at the time led AWS, was delivering his keynote before tens of thousands of people in the crowd, when the 18-wheeler joined him on stage.
“We’re going to need a bigger box,” Jassy said, as audience members rushed to raise their smartphones to capture photos of the spectacle.
Jassy told the crowd why the truck was groundbreaking. Over a 10 gigabit-per-second connection, it would take 26 years to move an exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of data to the cloud, he said. An AWS customer could do the job with 10 Snowmobiles in under six months, he said. Each Snowmobile had a capacity of 100 petabytes on hard disk drives.
In a blog post coinciding with the launch on Nov. 30, 2016, Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr described Snowmobile as “a ruggedized, tamper-resistant shipping container 45 feet long, 9.6 feet high, and 8 feet wide” that “can be parked in a covered or uncovered area adjacent to your existing data center.”
Barr helped to convey the supposed simplicity of the process with photos of a Snowmobile built out of Lego getting connected to a corporate data center.
“We intend to make sure that Snowmobile is both faster and less expensive than using a network-based data transfer model,” Barr wrote.
But the product didn’t take off.
A spokesperson for satellite operator Maxar said the company used Snowmobile once in 2017 to move more than 100 petabytes to AWS from its own servers.
“Since then, we have been uploading our imagery and associated data directly to the cloud,” the spokesperson said.
AWS still leads the giant cloud infrastructure market and generated $90.8 billion in revenue last year, accounting for 16% of Amazon’s total sales. The company’s spokesperson said AWS’ Snowball Edge devices, which clients can return to Amazon by mail after filling them up with data, are smaller than the Snowmobile vehicles, cost less and have a shorter turnaround time.
There’s also the AWS DataSync service for moving data, announced in 2018. Clients generally find that sending data to AWS online is more economical than using Snowmobile, the company said.
“We couldn’t be more proud of the value that Snowmobile has brought to customers, and we’re pleased to see them choosing newer, more efficient technologies,” the spokesperson wrote.
The U.K. and Germany are emerging as key hubs for a new wave of AI defense startups, as Europe scrambles to rearm amid rising geopolitical tensions.
Private funding for defense startups across the region has ramped up in recent years, with investors looking to tap into increasing government military budgets, driven by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and pressure from the Trump administration.
But it’s ecosystems in the U.K. and Germany that are seeing the most activity. The majority of the biggest rounds across the sector have been for startups based in those two countries, with both emerging as key launchpads into new markets and battlefield training.
David Ordonez, senior associate at NATO Innovation Fund, told CNBC that this was “thanks to the scientific expertise of their talent base, national commitments to treat this sector as an economic engine for growth and a manufacturing base that enables the rapid scaling of breakthrough innovation.”
‘Visible pathways to procurement’
Venture capital for European defense startups has spiked as members of the NATO military alliance have agreed to increase security spending to 5% of gross domestic product, and defense departments in London and Berlin have increasingly signaled a willingness to adopt new technology built by younger players in the market.
Investors, buoyed by the promise of commercial deals, have funneled a record $4.3 billion into the sector since the start of 2022, according to Dealroom — nearly four times the funds deployed in the previous four years.
Germany’s AI drone makers Helsing and Quantum Systems hit valuations of 12 and 3 billion euros this year, respectively, after rounds worth hundreds of millions of euros. In the U.K., manufacturing platform PhysicsX, which works with defense companies, raised $155 million this year, and missile interception startup Cambridge Aerospace reportedly picked up a $100 million round in August.
The U.K. government’s Strategic Defence Review in June proposed boosting spending on novel tech and streamlining procurement processes, as well as unveiling a £5 billion tech investment package.
“We see a system increasingly open to non-traditional primes, supported by wider investment in skills and technology,” Karl Brew, head of defense at Portuguese-U.K. drone startup Tekever, told CNBC.
Tekever, which became a unicorn this year, announced a major contract to supply uncrewed aerial systems to the Royal Air Force in May. Helsing has several contracts with the U.K. government, and U.S.-based Anduril signed a £30 million contract for its attack drones in March.
Tekever’s AR3 EVO drone undergoing pre-flight checks prior to being launched. Credit: Tekever
Germany announced its defense spending would rise to upwards of 100 billion euros — a record figure since the German reunification — from 2026, and also changed procurement processes to make it easier for startups to participate.
While most European governments have ramped up defense spending, Germany stands out as having “visible pathways from prototype to major procurement [for startups] that many other European markets still do not provide,” Meghan Welch, managing director at financial advisory firm BGL, told CNBC.
Helsing and attack drone startup Stark are both in line to win a contract for kamikaze drones, the Financial Times reported in October. Helsing and Stark declined to comment to CNBC about this.
Legacy infrastructure
Germany’s industrial heritage has also created talent pipelines and infrastructure that startups are tapping into.
“Germany has the industrial base, the infrastructure and the technical talent to produce the next-generation technologies NATO urgently needs,” Philip Lockwood, international managing director of Stark, told CNBC.
Founded in 2024, Stark is building attack and reconnaissance drones and has raised $100 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Peter Thiel’s Thiel Capital, and the NATO Innovation Fund.
Stark’s Virtus drone
“Many of Europe’s best engineers developed their expertise in Germany’s industrial and technological sectors, which have long led in hardware, software, manufacturing and supply-chain resilience,” Lockwood said.
The U.K.’s broader ecosystem is also a decisive factor in its appeal as a defense base, said Tekever’s Brew. “It brings together world-class universities and R&D centres with a dense network of aerospace, software and advanced-manufacturing suppliers,” he said.
Launchpads
Another key driver of defense tech in the U.K. and Germany is that both countries serve as launchpads into new markets or frontline training.
The U.K. has had a security and defense partnership with Australia and the U.S. since 2021, known as AUKUS, which has lifted certain export controls and restrictions on technology sharing between the nations.
“As part of AUKUS, the move into the UK was a natural entry point into Europe,” Rich Drake, managing director at Anduril UK, told CNBC.
Alongside signing contracts totalling nearly £30 million for its attack drones earlier this year, Anduril also has plans to open a new manufacturing and R&D facility in the UK.
Anduril UK’s Seabed Sentry. Credit: Anduril UK
“[AUKUS] allows us to work with the MOD [Ministry of Defence], align on operational needs and accelerate the deployment of leading autonomous systems in a context where trust, shared priorities and strategic alignment matter as much as technology,” Drake said.
U.S. defense startups looking to sell into European markets have also often chosen London as a base from which to expand across the region. Second Front Systems and Applied Intuition expanded into the country in 2023 and 2025, respectively.
“Given the history of the special relationship between the US and the UK, the UK serves as an excellent launching pad into the rest of the European market,” said Enrique Oti, chief strategy officer at Second Front Systems.
The U.K. can also serve as a base for European defense startups with global ambitions, added Dmitrii Ponomarev, product manager at VanEck.
“In practice the UK is becoming the interoperability testbed and politically acceptable landing zone for tech flowing in both directions,” Ponomarev told CNBC.
“If you can win a pilot with UK forces, comply with UK/US-aligned security and export regimes and operate in English with UK industrial and legal standards, you look much more ready to US primes, Department of War programs and AUKUS-related efforts.”
In 2025, some of Europe’s best-funded defense startups, including Helsing, Quantum Systems and Stark, announced factories, offices, or investments in the country.
Further east, Germany’s role as one of the largest donors of military aid to Ukraine has given the country’s startups a “front row seat for battlefield feedback,” said Ponomarev.
Quantum Systems has deployed its reconnaissance tech in Ukraine and Helsing announced in February it would produce thousands of strike drones for the country.
Despite the advances, analysts, investors and startup execs all caution there’s more work to be done to create the conditions for building global defense startups in the UK and Germany.
“Scaling remains difficult without continued political and procurement reform,” Ponomarev told CNBC.
“The UK still struggles with slow procurement cycles, clearance bottlenecks and a shortage of security-approved technical talent,” he added. Germany’s biggest obstacles are bureaucracy, strict export controls and heavy dependence on a single customer — the country’s armed forces, Ponomarev added.
BLG’s Welch said the winners of Europe’s AI defense boom “are likely to be companies that can master both the political economy, including export rules, alliances and public narratives, and the technology race, positioning themselves as enablers of national sovereignty rather than disruptors of it.”
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