Amazon.com Inc. is spending more than $100 million on a factory in Greenwood, Indiana, to build equipment for its warehouse robots, according to plans the company released today.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Greenwood will be the fourth plant Amazon uses to make robots. Until August there were only two, both in Massachusetts. The third went to Austin, Texas, that month, and Amazon has said the project there will cost billions of dollars. Robots from the Austin plant are meant to work alongside employees on repetitive tasks and heavy lifting.
Between them, the two new sites double the number of plants where Amazon builds robots. Amazon plans to fabricate, weld and powder-coat parts in the 585,000-square-foot Greenwood building before assembling them onsite, with robots doing the welding.
About 300 people are expected to be employed at the facility, and Amazon says that 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.
By Amazon’s count, its U.S. lines have turned out more than 1 million robots so far. More than 300 of its facilities around the world now use them, and the company says the machines assist employees with 75% of the customer orders it delivers. Amazon also says the rollout has created skilled roles for the technicians and engineers who maintain the machines.
Those robots have come out of Amazon’s plants in Massachusetts. Amazon’s robot making there traces back to 2012, when the company paid $775 million for warehouse robot maker Kiva Systems Inc. and its shelf-carrying drive units. Kiva became Amazon Robotics in 2015. A second plant, in Westborough, opened in 2021, and Amazon has said its lines there can turn out up to 1,000 robots a day.
Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide economic development, told the Journal that as the company deployed more than a million robots over the past decade, it also “hired hundreds of thousands of employees that work alongside those robots.” The New York Times reported last October that internal documents showed Amazon planning to avoid hiring more than 600,000 U.S. workers by 2033 through automation. Amazon disputed the report, and one of its spokespeople said then the documents came from “just one team” inside the company.
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun called Amazon’s choice of Indiana “a powerful testament to the strength of our manufacturing workforce.” Amazon listed that workforce first among its reasons for picking the site, ahead of the state’s operating costs and a central location that puts the plant within easy reach of Amazon’s fulfillment network across North America. Since its first Indiana fulfillment center opened in 2008, the company has grown its direct headcount in the state past 27,000 people.
