Amazon to spend $100M on Indiana plant, its fourth site for building robots

Amazon plans to invest over $100 million to build a new factory in Greenwood, Indiana, which will be the company's fourth plant dedicated to manufacturing robots. The Wall Street Journal reported that Greenwood will join the existing plants in Massachusetts and Austin, Texas. The Austin plant, which opened in August, is expected to cost billions of dollars and will produce robots designed to assist employees with repetitive tasks and heavy lifting.

The Greenwood facility, spanning 585,000 square feet, will be responsible for fabricating, welding, and powder-coating robot components before assembling them on-site. Around 300 workers are anticipated to work at the site, earning an average salary of $100,000 per year. The plant is scheduled to open by 2028, and Amazon claims its U.S. manufacturing lines have produced more than one million robots to date.

These robots are used in more than 300 facilities globally and assist employees with 75% of customer orders delivered by the company. Amazon's robot manufacturing efforts in Massachusetts began in 2012, after the acquisition of Kiva Systems Inc., which became Amazon Robotics in 2015. A second plant in Westborough, Massachusetts, opened in 2021, capable of producing up to 1,000 robots per day.

Holly Sullivan, Amazon's vice president of worldwide economic development, stated that the deployment of over a million robots over the past decade has led to the hiring of hundreds of thousands of employees who work alongside these robots. In October, The New York Times reported that internal documents showed Amazon's plan to avoid hiring more than 600,000 U.S. workers by 2033 through automation, a claim Amazon denied, stating that the documents originated from a single team within the company.

Indiana Governor Mike Braun praised Amazon's decision to locate the plant in Indiana, citing the state's strong manufacturing workforce as the primary reason for the choice. Amazon listed the workforce strength as the top reason for selecting the site, followed by affordable operating costs and a central location that allows the plant to be easily accessible from Amazon's fulfillment network across North America.

Since opening its first Indiana fulfillment center in 2008, the company has grown its workforce in the state to over 27,000 employees.