Inside Amazon’s robotic arms race and what it means for the future of human work

What happened

The second-largest corporate employer has bet big on robot workers to scale. 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 .