Amazon Counts Over 1 Million Warehouse Robots, AutoStore About 87,500 and Locus More Than 22,000, While Symbotic Counts Systems and Ocado Counts Modules

Amazon says it has deployed more than 1 million robots across its operations network since 2012. AutoStore’s presentation for the fourth quarter of 2025 gives about 87,500 robots, and Locus Robotics said on 6 October 2026 that its global fleet exceeds 22,000. Those are three different kinds of count, and two other large names, Symbotic and Ocado, report systems and modules instead of robots.

This piece takes each company’s own document, gives the period it covers and says what the figure counts. The Amazon fleet and its place in the jobs argument are covered in the million-robot workforce, so Amazon appears here for what it has published since.

Amazon: a running total since 2012, and one robot it dropped

Amazon’s robotics page words its total as more than 1 million robots deployed across its operations network since 2012. That is a cumulative figure for deployments. Amazon has not said how many of those robots are still working, and its June 2025 announcement of the millionth unit, delivered to a fulfilment centre in Japan, said the robot network spans more than 300 facilities.

People are counted in a different document. Amazon’s annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission says the company employed approximately 1,576,000 full-time and part-time employees on 31 December 2025, in every kind of job. No Amazon document cited here puts robots and staff on the same date, so a robots-per-worker ratio would set a June 2025 deployment total against a December 2025 headcount of all roles.

The productivity claims Amazon makes are per machine. Its robotics page says Sequoia, the inventory storage system, lets it identify and store inventory up to 75% faster, and the million-robot page says its DeepFleet model improves fleet travel time by 10%. Vulcan, an arm with a sense of touch that works on the grasping problem described in robots ace chess and flunk laundry, can pick and stow approximately three quarters of the types of items stored, a share of item types and not of units. Amazon names Spokane, Washington and Hamburg as Vulcan sites. The pages cited here give no packages-per-employee figure.

Amazon has also withdrawn a robot it announced. It unveiled Blue Jay in October 2025 as a system in which several arms work at once, combining three stations into one, and said it was in production testing at a South Carolina facility and could already handle approximately 75% of the item types Amazon stores. The same page now opens with an update dated 25 February 2026: “Amazon is no longer utilizing Blue Jay in operations.” Amazon adds that the technology behind it will keep supporting employees.

Ocado: 122 modules and no bot count

Ocado’s annual report covers the 52 weeks ended 30 November 2025 and counts capacity. At year end the group had 30 live sites, made up of 26 customer fulfilment centres (CFCs) and four smaller sites called Zooms, holding 122 live modules. The report assumes one module is 5,000 items picked an hour and about £79 million a year of partner live sales capacity.

A module counts as live when it is installed and available to the partner, or when Ocado is receiving fees for it. The 122 therefore includes 14 modules at sites where Ocado Retail has stopped operating but still pays fees. Partners were actively trading on 108 modules at 27 sites. Ocado shipped 72 million orders worldwide in the year.

The report does not give a total number of bots, or bots per grid. It does describe the machines. The 600 Series bot is three times lighter than the 500 Series and uses about 60% less energy a year, and Ocado’s Warsaw centre was the first international centre to go live with it. The 400 Series, in production since 2014, is still running, and Ocado recycled 833 stored 400 Series bots in the year.

On labour, the report says a productivity measure it calls UPH rose 7.9% to 245 from 227 across its six UK centres. At Luton, where on-grid robotic picking is in use, UPH averaged 289.

Symbotic: 50 systems in deployment and $22.5 billion in backlog

Symbotic sells whole systems in which autonomous bots move cases through a multi-level storage structure, and its filings count systems and dollars. In the 10-K for the year ended 27 September 2025, the company reports 50 Systems in Deployment, against 44 a year earlier, and defines deployment as the period from the signed statement of work until the customer accepts the system.

Backlog, which the filing defines as unperformed performance obligations under existing contracts, was approximately $22.5 billion, with Walmart and GreenBox making up the vast majority. GreenBox, a joint venture in which Symbotic holds 35% and SoftBank 65%, accounted for $11.6 billion. Backlog is contracted revenue, not machines, and the filing expects about 12% of it to be recognised in fiscal 2026.

Walmart accounted for approximately 85% of Symbotic’s revenue of about $2.25 billion, and its 2022 amended agreement extends the systems to all 42 of its regional distribution centres. The release for the quarter ended 27 June 2026 says the outlook is supported by 77 systems in deployment, and that GreenBox now does business as Exol. Neither document gives a robot count.

AutoStore: about 87,500 robots in about 1,900 systems

AutoStore sells cube storage systems, and it is the one company here that reports both robots and systems. Its Q4 2025 presentation gives about 87,500 robots and about 1,900 systems in 65 countries, with about 1,300 unique customers. A footnote says the robot and system figures are as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2025 and include installed base and backlog, so not every robot counted is yet running.

The 23 April 2026 annual report announcement updates the system count to more than 1,950 in over 65 countries. Dividing 87,500 by 1,900 gives roughly 46 robots per system, an average calculated here and not reported by AutoStore. The range is wide. One customer case in the same presentation, Polaris, lists a single installation with 74 R5 robots and 44,000 bins.

Locus and Agility: 22,000 robots, and one humanoid milestone

Locus Robotics makes autonomous mobile robots for order fulfilment. Its release of 6 October 2026 says the global fleet exceeds 22,000 robots, serving more than 150 customers with over 1,000 brands across more than 360 sites in more than 20 countries, and that the company has supported more than 8.5 billion picks. The numbers are Locus’s own. Spread across the sites, the fleet averages about 61 robots a site, an average calculated here.

Agility Robotics, which makes the Digit humanoid, reported on 20 November 2025 that Digit had moved over 100,000 totes at GXO’s Flowery Branch facility in Georgia, picking items on and off an autonomous mobile robot, moving them to a conveyor and stacking totes elsewhere on the floor. The post gives no robot count and no period. It counts work done, not machines. The wider humanoid field is covered in 2026 is the year humanoid robots clocked in.

The IFR counts sales, not fleets

The International Federation of Robotics, the industry body that collects robot statistics, said on 30 September 2026 that transport and logistics robots were the top professional service robot application in 2025, with 117,500 units sold, up 21% and 47% of professional service robot sales. Total professional service robot sales rose 24% to almost 250,000 units.

Those are units sold in one year, and the IFR describes the category as robots used for transportation, material flows and delivery processes. It is not a count of robots in service, and it is not limited to warehouses.

India’s big sorters are mostly belts

Indian parcel networks disclose sorting capacity more often than robot counts. Delhivery’s directors’ report for the year ended 31 March 2025 says the company operated 45 fully and semi-automated sortation centres and 111 gateways, with a “Rated Automated Sort Capacity of 8.2 million shipments per day”. A rating is what the machines are built to handle, not volume handled. The report lists automated material handling at gateways in Bhiwandi, Tauru and Bengaluru.

The Bhiwandi hub, launched in December 2023 according to trade press, has 1.8 km of double-deck cross-belt sorters that can process over 32,000 shipments an hour. Falcon Autotech, a company Delhivery has invested in, built and installed the system. Cross-belt sorters carry parcels on moving belts rather than on free-roaming robots.

Flipkart’s robot sorting was announced in March 2019 at its Soukya sortation centre in Bengaluru: more than 100 self-guided vehicles, a stated capacity of up to 4,500 shipments an hour, scalable over five times, and a target of a 60% gain in process efficiency. The company said staff would be trained to operate the vehicles. Ecom Express said in October 2021 that it had over 3 million parcels a day of processing capacity and had invested in high-speed automated sorters at centres and hubs, without saying how many.

What the jobs research covers

The most-cited peer-reviewed estimate is by the economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, issued as NBER Working Paper 23285 and published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2020. Their abstract says one more industrial robot per thousand workers lowers the employment-to-population ratio by about 0.18 to 0.34 percentage points and wages by about 0.25 to 0.5 percent, for the rise in industrial robot use between 1990 and 2007.

That period ends five years before 2012, the year Amazon says it began its robotics work, and the machines studied were industrial robots, so the paper does not measure mobile warehouse robots. The company side is thin. Amazon says the advanced robotics at its Shreveport site require 30% more employees in reliability, maintenance and engineering roles, and none of the documents cited here reports a site’s total headcount before and after robots arrived.