Amazon Aims High With Drones Amid Worries Rivals Could Fly Past
Amazon plans a massive expansion of its Prime Air drone delivery, aiming for nearly 500 U.S. cities by 2026, fulfilling a decade-old vision. While Amazon has made hundreds of thousands of deliveries this year, competitors like Alphabet's Wing, Walmart, and Zipline are already far ahead, with millions of deliveries and rapid expansion plans. Uber and Zipline even target 1 million daily deliveries by 2029. Amazon faces challenges including past drone incidents, regulatory scrutiny, and community opposition over noise and privacy. Despite these hurdles, Amazon is pushing for ultra-fast delivery, with FAA approval for scaled operations, as drone delivery becomes a standard retail offering.
For well over a decade, Amazon has been promising that the future of shopping would arrive from above. Now, after years of regulatory battles, technical setbacks and relatively small delivery numbers, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ vision is finally beginning to look less like science fiction.
Amazon said Wednesday that it plans to make Prime Air drone delivery available in nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of this year, representing a roughly sixfold expansion of its current footprint.
That would put millions more consumers within range of its small autonomous aircraft, carrying everything from groceries and medicines to consumer electronics and household essentials.
It would also be the culmination of one of the company’s longest-running experiments. Bezos originally unveiled Prime Air in 2013, promising packages weighing up to five pounds could be delivered in 30 minutes or less, but 13 years later Amazon has found itself still working toward that vision.
In the meantime, others have jumped on board. Alphabet’s Wing has already completed more than 1 million commercial deliveries and is expanding its Walmart network to nearly 20 U.S. markets. Walmart itself passed 1 million drone deliveries in May of this year, with an average delivery time of 23 minutes and reported a fastest delivery of just 4 minutes, 44 seconds.
Meanwhile, Zipline has surpassed 2 million deliveries across four continents and raised more than $600 million in its latest funding round, giving the company a reported valuation of $7.6 billion.
And Uber and Zipline this week announced a partnership targeting as many as 1 million drone deliveries a day by 2029, with launches planned in Dallas and Houston by the end of this year.
Amazon, by contrast, said Wednesday that Prime Air has made hundreds of thousands of deliveries so far this year and is now completing thousands a day, expanding beyond its original markets around Dallas and Phoenix to 11 metropolitan areas, with additional locations expected to include Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Boise and Syracuse.
The company’s MK30 drones can carry packages weighing up to five pounds and operate within roughly a 7.5-mile radius of a delivery facility and most deliveries take about an hour, although Amazon says some have reached customers within minutes of checkout.
It is also part of its onging push into grocery, where it has seen uneven progress.
“Customers continue to demand faster delivery times,” David Carbon, Amazon’s vice president of Prime Air, told employees in an internal meeting in March, according to a recording obtained by CNBC. “Bottom line is we have yet to reach diminishing returns when it comes to how fast we deliver to our customers.”
Amazon had previously said it wants drones to eventually handle as many as 500 million packages a year and received FAA approval in 2024 to conduct longer-range, beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations, a critical step toward operating drones at scale without pilots physically watching individual aircraft.
However, Amazon's drones have collided with infrastructure and triggered regulatory scrutiny. In October 2025, two drones struck a crane in Tolleson, Arizona, prompting investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board and FAA. Another incident involved an Amazon drone that struck an internet cable while taking off in Waco, Texas.
The company has also faced opposition from communities concerned about noise, privacy and the potential effect of drones on neighborhoods and property values.
On top of that, its current drones hover above their final destination and release packages from roughly 13 feet, limiting what can be deleivered, but the company is testing a retractable tether that gently lowers parcels instead.
That is an area where competitors are already ahead, with Wing using a tether to lower packages, while Walmart says its drone service has evolved from a novelty, with customers ordering snacks or bananas, to a repeat delivery option for everyday needs. Wing and Walmart are now planning more than 270 drone delivery locations, reaching more than 40 million Americans by 2027.
For Amazon, then, the drone is no longer a futuristic side project but the irony is that Bezos’ 2013 vision may finally be arriving not because the rest of retail delivery has caught up.