Amazon invests $100M to manufacture robots in Indiana

HMHSeptember 24, 2026

Amazon is building a $100 million robotics manufacturing facility in Greenwood, Indiana. It's part of a long-running strategic shift from being the world's biggest robot buyer to becoming a major robot maker.

Amazon announced Wednesday it will build a $100 million advanced manufacturing facility in Greenwood, Indiana, creating 300 jobs averaging nearly $100,000 a year. The facility will make the automation equipment that powers Amazon's own fulfillment network: CNC machining, robotic welding, automated powder coating, assembly.

This is not for sale to outside customers. It's strictly for Amazon's internal use across North America.

Amazon already operates more than 1 million robots across 300-plus facilities globally, including drive units, picking arms, sorting systems, package handlers. The company built that entire fleet through purchasing, partnerships, and its 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems for $775 million.

Now it is building the manufacturing capacity to make that hardware itself.

From robot buyer to robot maker

The Indiana facility, opening in 2028, is Amazon's fourth robotics manufacturing plant and its second announced in two months. In August 2026, Amazon announced a similar hub in Austin, Texas. Together, those two announcements double Amazon's in-house manufacturing footprint for automation hardware.

The strategic logic is straightforward.

Amazon's robot fleet is a competitive moat: the physical infrastructure that keeps its fulfillment margins defensible as labor costs rise. Proprietary manufacturing gives the company control over specifications, cost trajectories, and supply chain resilience. Companies that rely entirely on outside vendors for core operational technology are perpetually exposed to lead times, price changes, and capability gaps that competitors who make their own hardware are not.

(At least in theory.)

At $100 million and 300 jobs, this isn't a moonshot. It's a practical consolidation: Amazon pulling a critical production function in-house after two decades of building a robotics program through acquisitions and outside sourcing.

Where humanoids fit

The Greenwood facility will produce warehouse automation hardware, not humanoid robots. But humanoids are not absent from Amazon's roadmap.

Since 2023, Amazon has been piloting Agility Robotics' Digit humanoid in its facilities, testing it on empty tote transport: repetitive, low-value physical work. Amazon has participated in Agility's funding rounds and remains one of the highest-profile humanoid pilots in US logistics.

Building the manufacturing muscle to make your own warehouse robots is the adjacent capability that makes scaling a humanoid fleet tractable eventually. Supply chain infrastructure, manufacturing engineering depth, component procurement relationships — Indiana and Texas are building that foundation. Whether Amazon eventually makes its own humanoids, deepens the Agility partnership, or simply stays a sophisticated buyer is an open question.

What's not open: the vertical integration trajectory.

The jobs math

Three hundred jobs at $100,000 average means $30 million a year in direct payroll against a $100 million capital investment. The roles skew technical: CNC operators, welders, powder coating technicians, controls engineers, manufacturing engineers, quality assurance. These are not warehouse picker jobs with high turnover. They're skilled manufacturing positions that anchor communities for decades.

Amazon has invested more than $40 billion in Indiana since 2008, employing more than 27,000 people in the state. The Greenwood facility expands an existing footprint ... Amazon already operates a fulfillment operation on the same Collins Road corridor. State and local incentives for this announcement haven't been publicly detailed; Amazon inherited an existing tax abatement from the site's previous developer rather than negotiating a new package.

Amazon's own data shows its robotics program has reduced recordable workplace injuries by more than 40% across its network.

The world's biggest logistics company is potentially becoming the world's biggest logistics robot manufacturer.