Greenwood facility scheduled to open by 2028, joining planned Austin hub
Amazon.com announced plans to spend more than $100 million on a new robotics manufacturing facility in Greenwood, Indiana, set to open by 2028. The plant, paired with a robotics hub Amazon announced last month in Austin, Texas, will double the company’s robot-making facilities to four.
Amazon, already one of the world’s biggest robot makers, is scaling up production as it automates more of the work inside its warehouses. The company said the Indiana facility would create 300 skilled manufacturing and engineering jobs, commanding average salaries of almost $100,000 a year — well above the state’s median household income.
“We’ve deployed over a million robots over the last decade, and in that time, we’ve hired hundreds of thousands of employees that work alongside those robots,” said Holly Sullivan, vice president of worldwide economic development at Amazon.
Amazon’s robotics investments date to its $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012 and have put the company at the center of a debate over how automation and artificial intelligence will affect workers, including its own workforce of more than 1.5 million.
Amazon currently operates two robotics manufacturing facilities in Massachusetts, where Kiva Systems was based. The facilities serve as research, development and manufacturing centers for several types of robots, including Sparrow, a robotic arm that consolidates inventory before it is packaged, and Proteus, a disc-shaped autonomous robot that transports carts of packages weighing around 900 pounds. Amazon produces the robots exclusively for its own use and has deployed them across more than 300 facilities, where they assist with 75% of customer orders, according to the company.
Joseph Quinlivan, Amazon’s vice president of fulfillment technology and robotics, said workers initially expressed hesitancy around Proteus when it was rolled out but adapted “because very quickly they saw how they behaved and they saw there was no incidents.”
Amazon selected Indiana for the new facility because of the state’s manufacturing roots and Amazon’s existing operations there, Sullivan said. She said Amazon would benefit from a tax abatement that the prior developer and landlord of the site had secured.
Public sentiment around AI and jobs has worsened in recent years. About seven in 10 U.S. adults said AI will result in job losses over the next 20 years — a seven percentage-point increase over two years, according to data from Pew Research Center.
Scott Devitt, a senior research analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, said technological advancements could drive demand for more skilled workers. He said AI and robotics would “shift the labor force around” and could lead to some job displacement in Amazon’s fulfillment centers.
Amazon recently said it was boosting pay for some workers, raising the minimum starting wage for its U.S. full-time core operations employees to $20 an hour, and would offer discounts on groceries through its online platforms and Whole Foods Market locations. The company said it has invested more than $230 billion in manufacturing since 2010.