With a Super Bowl ad costing around $5 million for a 30-second slot, it’s always interesting to see which companies cough up the cash and how they use their time.
Amazon, for example, split its input into three 10-second segments on Sunday, each one promoting its Echo speaker and its incorporated personal assistant called Alexa.
The last of the three ads also included a surprise cameo from its Prime Air delivery drone, a move notifying the masses that the company is still working tirelessly on developing the flying machine and that, yes, it really does want to use it to deliver stuff to your home. One day.
The ad (shown below) shows a guy watching the game while messily wolfing down a load of Doritos. Next to him, a woman, looking a little put off by his boorish behavior, asks Alexa to “reorder Doritos from Prime Air.”
“OK, look for delivery soon,” Alexa says, her response teasing Amazon shoppers with the prospect of an imminent launch of its Prime Air drone. However, a disclaimer shown at the bottom of the screen serves to dampen expectations: “Prime Air is not available in some states (or any really). Yet.”
At the end of the slot, Amazon’s drone buzzes into view, the ordered chips presumably packed safely inside an on-board compartment.
Doritos. Drones. Drama. The perfect recipe for the big game. #JustAsk Alexa #SB51 pic.twitter.com/5sMvM5O6mU
— Amazon Echo (@amazonecho) February 6, 2017
The company, which is better known for its gargantuan ecommerce website than unmanned aerial vehicles, has been working on its delivery drone for around four years. Designed first as a quadcopter, the machine was radically overhauled toward the end of 2015 to include not only propellors, but wings, too, a change that helped to increase its speed, stability, and maneuverability. And with a 15-mile range, it can also fly five miles farther than the original design.
While a number of U.S.-based businesses are looking to launch similar drone delivery services, strict rules for commercial operators laid down last year by the Federal Aviation Administration mean such a system could still be a ways off.
Meanwhile, in the U.K., Amazon recently managed to launch a very limited delivery service using its drone. And in New Zealand, Domino’s is dropping off orders of its doughy delights to “select customers” in a community north of Auckland.
Related Posts
Talk to AI every day? New research says it might signal depression
This finding comes from a national survey of nearly 21,000 U.S. adults conducted in 2025, where participants detailed how often they interacted with generative AI tools and completed standard mental health questionnaires. Within that group, about 10% said they used AI daily, and 5% said they engaged with chatbots multiple times throughout the day. Those daily users showed higher rates of reported depressive symptoms and other negative emotional effects, such as anxiety and irritability.
You might actually be able to buy a Tesla robot in 2027
The comments follow a series of years-long development milestones. Optimus, which was originally unveiled as the Tesla Bot in 2021, has undergone multiple prototype iterations and has already been pressed into service handling simple tasks in Tesla factories. According to Musk, those internal deployments will expand in complexity later this year, helping prepare the robotics platform for broader use.
Blue Origin joins the satellite internet race with its 6 Tbps TeraWave network
According to the official announcement, Blue Origin plans to launch 5,280 low-Earth orbit satellites and 128 medium-Earth orbit satellites for the service, with the first ones set to deploy in late 2027. The low-Earth satellites will rely on RF connectivity and offer a max data transfer speed of 144 Gbps, while the medium-Earth satellites will use optical links to reach the publicized 6 Tbps speed. In comparison, SpaceX's Starlink maxes out at 400 Mbps at the moment, with future upgrades aiming for 1 Gbps.