Amazon's Million-Robot Fleet Is Doubling Down on Arms, Not Just Wheels

No organization in the world operates more robots than Amazon. According to a report published October 12, 2026 by Ars Technica, the company has more than one million robots working in its warehouses around the clock, making tens of millions of same-day and one-day deliveries possible every day. The surprise is not the scale of the fleet but where Amazon is investing next: in arms that can pick, pack, and touch, and in the factories that build the robots themselves.

Amazon's robotic fleet traces back to its 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems, a warehouse robot maker the company bought for $775 million and later renamed Amazon Robotics. The core insight has not changed since: wheeled mobile robots bring racks of items to workers instead of requiring people to walk miles of aisles each shift. Most of the million-robot fleet still consists of these drive units. The company says its Sequoia containerized storage system can identify and store items up to 75 percent faster at fulfillment centers by coordinating swarms of such robots, while the Hercules and Titan drive units, described as the size of a pool table and a baby grand piano, roam aisles retrieving tall pods packed with plastic tote crates.

The new production network

Until this year, Amazon built nearly all of its robots in Massachusetts, at two plants including a Westborough facility that opened in 2021 with lines that can turn out up to 1,000 robots a day. That is about to change. Amazon announced in August that it would build a third robot production factory in Austin, Texas, a project the company has said will cost billions of dollars, with robots there meant to work alongside employees on repetitive tasks and heavy lifting.

Then in September, Amazon detailed a fourth site: a 585,000-square-foot factory in Greenwood, Indiana, that will cost more than $100 million. The Greenwood building will fabricate, weld, and powder-coat parts before assembling them on site, with robots doing the welding. About 300 people are expected to be employed at the facility, and Amazon says the average salary for those manufacturing and engineering jobs should come in close to $100,000 a year. The plant is expected to open by 2028.

Between them, the Austin and Greenwood sites double the number of plants where Amazon builds robots. Indiana Governor Mike Braun called the choice "a powerful testament to the strength of our manufacturing workforce." By Amazon's own count, its U.S. lines have turned out more than one million robots so far, more than 300 facilities around the world now use them, and the machines assist employees with 75 percent of the customer orders it delivers.

Arms are the real growth story

The wheeled fleet gets the attention, but the robotic arms are where the fastest growth and the hardest technical problems sit. Amazon Robotics vice president Scott Dresser told Ars Technica that the deployed arm fleet numbers in the single-digit thousands, and in July, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company expects to more than double that fleet during 2026.

The arms form a progression of increasing dexterity. Robin, Amazon's first in-house arm for sorting packages from cluttered piles, was tested in 2021 and deployed in 2022, with machine learning steadily improving its pick success. Cardinal packs packages weighing up to 50 pounds densely into carts bound for trucks. Sparrow, built to handle hundreds of millions of differently shaped products, is the arm Amazon leans on most for AI: Dresser called it "the first place where we truly deployed foundation models."

Vulcan takes the next step. It is the first Amazon arm to combine vision with force-feedback sensing, effectively a sense of touch, allowing it to place items into bins or pull them out without crushing them. It began operating in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany, in 2025, and Amazon expects to scale it up in 2027. A next-generation Proteus mobile robot, unveiled earlier this year, can now respond to plain conversational text prompts and roam freely around human workers instead of staying inside fenced areas.

Coordinating all of this is DeepFleet, a generative AI foundation model that helps predict robot congestion before it happens. Amazon has said the system has improved fleet travel time by 10 percent, one of the first large-scale uses of a foundation model for fleet logistics.

"Each step of the way, we are tackling a hard or deep set of technical challenges to achieve that goal." Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, on building robots around employee and customer needs.

The unresolved human question

Despite deploying so many robots, Amazon remains the world's second-largest corporate employer, with more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers according to its 2025 annual report. The company says robots take on tasks with high injury risks, such as moving heavy items or retrieving goods from high places, easing the burden on employees. Labor groups and researchers offer a more complicated picture: robots can increase work intensity by pushing up the pace of work.

A study published in the academic journal ILR Review in April 2025 found that robot-equipped fulfillment centers had 40 percent fewer serious injuries than conventional centers, but 77 percent more minor injuries from repetitive motions. The study analyzed weekly data from more than 150 Amazon fulfillment centers between 2016 and 2019. Amazon countered that the criticism relies on old data from before the latest robots were introduced, saying its total recordable incident rate has improved by 43 percent since 2019 and the rate of incidents requiring time off has improved by 70 percent. It also noted that the number of robot maintenance technicians has increased by more than 30 percent.

The longer-term employment picture is murkier. An internal Amazon strategy document reported by The New York Times in October 2025 included a projection that expanding robots could cut expected hiring demand in the United States by more than 160,000 by 2027 and by 600,000 by 2033. Amazon said at the time that the document reflected the view of one organization within the company. Amazon has also said that fulfillment centers with advanced robotics typically employ 30 percent more people in reliability, maintenance, and engineering roles.

What is clear is that Amazon is treating robots as core infrastructure rather than an experiment: it is building the factories, designing the arms, training the AI, and hiring the maintenance workforce in parallel. Whether the result is a safer, more productive workplace or simply a faster one depends on metrics that will take years to settle. For now, the million-robot milestone marks the moment warehouse robotics stopped being a pilot program and became an industrial base.