Amazon now operates more than 1 million robots in its warehouses, more than any other organization in the world, and is building new factories to produce increasingly capable machines for its fulfillment network1,2.
The robots work around the clock to support tens of millions of same-day and one-day package deliveries daily. Despite the scale of automation, 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.
Amazon executives say the growing robot fleet has eased the burden on human workers by absorbing the toughest fulfillment center tasks, specifically those carrying the greatest risks of physical fatigue and injury. Labor advocacy groups and independent researchers counter that AI-driven warehouse automation is not uniformly beneficial for the humans who work alongside the machines.
Brian Greenwood, a professor of business at George Mason University, told Ars that the current wave of automation differs from the pattern of the past century. "For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we've seen usually happens away from workers—you're taking that high-risk task away from the worker, and you're doing so in a way that is not physically proximate," Greenwood said.
ANALYSIS The distinction Greenwood draws is that collaborative warehouse robots operate in close physical proximity to human workers rather than replacing them at a distance, raising questions about pace-of-work pressure even as injury-prone tasks are offloaded.
Amazon is poised to grow the fleet further in the coming years as it establishes new manufacturing facilities dedicated to producing more capable robots. The robotics expansion comes alongside the company's broader AI push: Amazon is separately in talks to acquire Decart, the AI startup whose software helps developers run models across different processors, in a deal that could value the company at approximately $7 billion[2].