For more than a decade, Amazon has been one of the most important end users of robotics in the world. Increasingly, that description is incomplete.
Amazon announced Sept. 24 that it plans to invest more than $100 million in a new 585,000-square-foot advanced manufacturing facility in Greenwood, Indiana. The plant is expected to begin operations by 2028, create about 300 manufacturing and engineering jobs, and produce equipment for Amazon’s fulfillment and robotics network across North America.
Greenwood follows Amazon’s August announcement of a new robotics manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas. That site is expected to create 300 to 500 manufacturing and engineering jobs and produce robotics systems for Amazon operations.
Taken together with Amazon’s established robotics manufacturing operations in Massachusetts, the expansion points to a larger shift. Amazon isn’t simply buying enormous quantities of robots anymore. It is designing them, manufacturing them, deploying them at enormous scale and developing the AI that coordinates them.
Amazon is becoming a robotics manufacturer.
From Kiva Customer to Million-Robot Operator
The transformation traces back to Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012.
Kiva’s mobile robots changed Amazon fulfillment by bringing shelves of products to workers rather than requiring workers to walk through enormous warehouses retrieving inventory. Amazon subsequently expanded well beyond that original architecture, developing systems for moving inventory, sorting packages, manipulating individual products and transporting goods through its facilities.
The scale has become difficult to ignore.
Amazon announced in June 2025 that it had deployed its one-millionth robot. The company’s robotic fleet operates across more than 300 facilities worldwide, and Amazon describes itself as the world’s largest manufacturer and operator of mobile robotics.
That scale changes the economics of building robots.
Amazon has enough internal demand to support something few end users could justify: its own large-scale robotics manufacturing operation.
Building the Factories That Build the Robots
Amazon’s robotics manufacturing roots remain in Massachusetts.
The company opened its 350,000-square-foot Westborough robotics manufacturing facility in 2021, adding manufacturing, engineering, research and development capacity alongside its existing North Reading operation. Amazon said the two facilities would serve as an epicenter for its robotics development.
The manufacturing capacity is significant. Amazon has said its production lines can collectively build as many as 1,000 robots per day.
Now that footprint is spreading.
Amazon announced the Austin facility in August. Greenwood follows a little more than a month later, extending Amazon’s manufacturing footprint into another major U.S. logistics and manufacturing region. The Indiana operation also shows how vertically integrated this strategy is becoming.
Amazon says the facility will bring advanced fabrication, robotic welding, automated powder coating and assembly under one roof, supported by AWS, AI-powered smart manufacturing systems and robotics. Positions are expected to include CNC operators, welders, assemblers, manufacturing engineers, controls engineers and quality assurance specialists.
There is an interesting circularity to the model: Amazon will use automation to manufacture automation that will automate Amazon.
Amazon’s Customer Is Amazon
That creates an advantage traditional robotics manufacturers cannot easily replicate.
A robot manufacturer typically develops a system, sells it to customers, watches how those customers use it and incorporates what it learns into subsequent generations. Amazon can compress that cycle.
Its engineers can identify an operational problem inside an Amazon facility, develop a robot around that problem, manufacture the system, deploy it into the company’s own fulfillment network and collect operating data at enormous scale.
Those lessons can then flow back into the next generation of hardware and software. Amazon doesn’t have to guess what its largest customer wants.
It is the customer.
The company’s DeepFleet system adds another layer. Amazon says the generative AI foundation model coordinates movement across its robotic fleet and can improve robot fleet travel efficiency by 10%. It was developed using Amazon’s own inventory-movement data and AWS tools.
Amazon therefore increasingly controls much of the robotics stack: the application, facility, robot, manufacturing process, software, fleet orchestration, operational data and cloud infrastructure supporting it. That is a very different position from simply being a large automation customer.
What Happens If Amazon Starts Selling Robots?
For now, Amazon’s primary robotics customer remains Amazon.
That distinction matters. Companies such as FANUC, ABB and Yaskawa built their robotics businesses largely around selling equipment to thousands of external customers. Amazon built its operation around solving its own fulfillment problems. But the boundary may not remain that clear.
In his 2025 shareholder letter, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company would explore opportunities to use its scale and real-time robotics feedback loop to develop robotics solutions for other industrial and consumer customers.
That possibility makes Amazon’s expanding manufacturing footprint more important.
A company with more than one million deployed robots, hundreds of operating sites, its own robotics manufacturing capacity, AWS infrastructure and years of real-world operating data would enter the external robotics market from a very different starting point than a typical robotics startup.
It would already have its proving ground.
The Next Amazon Robotics Story
Greenwood matters because of more than the $100 million investment or 300 jobs.
It is another indication of how Amazon’s position in the robotics industry is changing. The company started as an automation customer, became one of the world’s largest robot operators and has increasingly brought robot development and manufacturing in-house.
Now it is expanding that manufacturing footprint geographically. For years, the robotics industry watched Amazon because of how many robots it bought and deployed.
The next chapter may be about how many it builds and eventually, who it builds them for.
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