Amazon passes 1 million warehouse robots as questions grow over human workers
Amazon now runs more than 1 million robots around the clock in warehouses worldwide to support tens of millions of same-day and one-day deliveries daily, and it is building new factories in Austin, Texas and Greenwood, Indiana to expand the fleet further; according to its 2025 annual report it still employs more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers. Amazon executives say robots absorb the toughest, highest-injury-risk fulfillment tasks, and a spokesperson said the company's global recordable incident rate improved 43% and its lost-time incident rate 70% since 2019, but the Strategic Organizing Center union coalition, a 2024 Senate HELP Committee investigation led by Senator Bernie Sanders and an April 2025 ILR Review study paint a more mixed picture: severe injuries fell 40% at robot warehouses while lighter repetitive-strain injuries rose 77%. The report also details Sequoia, Proteus and the DeepFleet coordination models plus the Robin, Cardinal, Sparrow and Vulcan arms — Vulcan being the first to combine vision with force-feedback touch, running in Spokane and Hamburg since 2025 with wider rollout expected in 2027.
The report lays out the two-sided effect of AI-driven robotics at scale: fewer severe injuries alongside more repetitive-strain injuries, with robots setting work pace cited as a key mechanism, keeping Amazon's automation claims contested by labor groups and researchers.
No organization in the world operates more robots than Amazon. The company already has more than 1 million robots working in warehouses around the clock to make tens of millions of same-day and one-day package deliveries happen on a daily basis—and Amazon is poised to significantly grow that robotic fleet in the coming years as it establishes new factories to churn out increasingly more capable robot workers.
Despite deploying so many robots, Amazon is also the second-largest corporate employer in the world, with more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers, according to its 2025 annual report. Amazon executives say that the growing robot fleet has eased the burden on its human workforce by taking on the toughest fulfillment center tasks that carry the greatest risks of physical fatigue and injury. But labor advocacy groups and independent researchers point to evidence suggesting that warehouse automation driven by AI is not all upside for the humans who work alongside robots.
“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,” Brad Greenwood, professor of business at George Mason University, told Ars. “The rise of collaborative robots really changes that dynamic for two reasons: one is that it is physically proximate, and two, the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work.”
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