Amazon to spend $100 million on Indiana plant, its fourth robot-making site

Until August there were only two Amazon robot plants, both in Massachusetts. The third, in Austin, Texas, was announced that month, and Amazon has said the project there will cost billions of dollars. Robots built in Austin are intended to work alongside employees on repetitive tasks and heavy lifting. Together, the Austin and Greenwood sites double the number of plants where Amazon builds robots.

In Greenwood, Amazon plans to fabricate, weld and powder-coat parts in a 585,000-square-foot building before assembling them on site, with robots performing the welding. About 300 people are expected to work at the facility, and Amazon says average pay for the 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 one million robots. More than 300 of its facilities worldwide now use them, and the company says the machines assist employees with 75 percent of the customer orders it delivers. Amazon also says the rollout has created skilled roles for the technicians and engineers who maintain the machines.

The 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 that 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.

Editor's Summary

Amazon plans to invest more than $100 million in a Greenwood, Indiana plant that will make and assemble components for its warehouse robots, the fourth such site and the second added since August. The company says roughly 300 manufacturing and engineering jobs will pay close to $100,000 a year on average when the plant opens by 2028. Amazon counts more than one million robots built on its U.S. lines and says they assist employees with 75 percent of the orders it delivers.