Amazon pours hundreds of millions into fully automated delivery stations powered by AI and robotics

Amazon is building what it calls the “delivery station of the future,” a facility designed to handle packages with minimal human intervention. The first one is expected to go live in 2026, capping off a multi-year, multi-hundred-million-dollar investment in automating the last mile of its logistics empire. The robots are already here, and multiplying Amazon hit a significant milestone in mid-2025 when it deployed its one millionth robot. That figure spans fulfillment centers, sortation facilities, and delivery stations globally, making Amazon one of the largest operators of industrial robotics on the planet. Among the more notable systems is Cardinal, a robotic arm designed to pick up packages and stack them into containers with spatial efficiency that mirrors a Tetris board. The system determines optimal placement based on package dimensions and weight, reducing wasted space and speeding up the loading process for delivery vans. On the software side, the company developed an AI model called DeepFleet to manage robotic coordination across facilities. DeepFleet optimizes travel paths for fleets of autonomous machines, improving their collective efficiency by roughly 10%. In a wareho...