Amazon has built over a million robots – now it’s building a factory to make even more of them

Amazon’s robot army is getting its own factory. The company will spend more than $100 million turning a warehouse in Greenwood, Indiana, into a plant that builds parts for its robots and fulfilment systems, it announced on Thursday. It’s the second robot-making site Amazon has announced in two months, and it will double its US robotics manufacturing footprint to four plants.

What Amazon is building

• A 585,000 sq ft plant in Greenwood, just south of Indianapolis, due to open by 2028.
• 300 jobs averaging nearly $100,000 a year, including CNC operators, welders, powder-coating technicians, assemblers and engineers.
• Everything under one roof: fabrication, robotic welding, automated powder coating and assembly, run with what Amazon calls “AWS and AI-powered smart manufacturing systems and robotics.”
• Its products will go to Amazon’s fulfilment and robotics network across North America. Amazon hasn’t said which robots or parts it will make there.

It follows a separate robotics manufacturing hub in Austin, Texas, which Amazon announced in August. Until now, its robots have mainly been built in Massachusetts, The AI Insider notes.

Indiana’s governor welcomed the news:

Amazon’s decision to locate this facility in Indiana is a powerful testament to the strength of our manufacturing workforce.

Mike Braun, Governor of Indiana

A million robots, and counting

The scale of Amazon’s automation is easy to miss. The company says it has built more than 1 million robots in the US, working across more than 300 facilities, and that they help with 75% of all the customer orders it delivers worldwide. These are Amazon’s own figures.

They range from the squat blue drive units that carry shelves of stock to workers, to Proteus, Amazon’s first fully autonomous mobile robot, which moves safely around people; Hercules, which can lift 1,250 pounds of inventory; and Vulcan, a robot arm introduced in 2025 that uses touch sensors and AI to stow and pick items in tight spaces.

The AI running the fleet

Amazon doesn’t just build robots, it builds the AI that runs them. In 2025 it launched DeepFleet, a generative AI foundation model that acts like a traffic-control system for its robots, planning routes and cutting congestion across a warehouse. Amazon says it made the fleet’s travel time 10% more efficient, according to its announcement.

DeepFleet coordinates our robots’ movements to optimize how they navigate our fulfillment centers.

Scott Dresser, vice president, Amazon Robotics

The new plant brings that approach to the factory floor: robots and AI-run manufacturing systems building the parts for more robots.

The jobs question

Amazon is keen to stress the 300 well-paid jobs. “This facility represents a significant investment in the Indianapolis community that will create jobs with a median salary well above the regional average,” said Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of economic development. The company also says it has trained more than 700,000 employees in new skills since 2019.

But the robots the plant supports are designed to reduce the need for people. Internal documents reported by the New York Times last October suggested Amazon hopes automation will let it avoid hiring more than 600,000 US workers by 2033, even as sales double, and that its robotics team’s ultimate goal is to automate 75% of its operations, Gizmodo reported. Amazon said the documents were legitimate but “incomplete,” and didn’t represent its overall hiring strategy.

Why it matters

Amazon has quietly become one of the world’s biggest robot makers, and it’s now building its own supply chain to make even more. Each new plant is a bet that the next phase of its business will be run by AI and machines, with a smaller number of skilled, well-paid people building and maintaining them.

Sources: Amazon, The AI Insider, Amazon (DeepFleet), Gizmodo (citing the New York Times), Quartz