Amazon to invest more than €10B in European fulfillment expansion, betting on next-gen warehouse robots

Amazon is stepping up automation across Europe, announcing more than €10 billion in investment to expand and modernize its fulfillment centers, alongside a new wave of warehouse robotics. The company made the announcement at its Delivering the Future event in London, framing the effort as a long-term push to increase capacity and productivity while shifting employees toward work that is less repetitive and more supervisory or skilled.

A central part of Amazon’s plan is the introduction of a next-generation Proteus, an autonomous warehouse robot designed to move heavy carts and cover long distances inside fulfillment sites. Amazon said the updated Proteus can operate across fulfillment locations and is able to take direction from employees using conversational prompts, with the robot determining priority, route, and timing. Amazon also said Proteus is being piloted in its labs, with deployment in Europe planned for the first half of 2027.

The investment also includes expansion of other robotics systems Amazon has described internally. Amazon said it will grow Vulcan, which it calls its first robot with a sense of touch, and it will expand STARK, a collaborative robotic tote-handling system that works alongside employees by picking full totes from conveyors and placing them on carts. Amazon said STARK was first piloted in Barcelona and is planned to reach 15 sites across Europe by 2027.

In addition to robotics, Amazon said the broader fulfillment expansion will support more staffing needs, with plans to grow the European fulfillment center workforce by 25,000 over the coming years. Amazon also tied the operational changes to its employee training effort, stating it is committing $1 billion to its Career Choice program globally by 2030, including training pathways tied to areas such as cybersecurity, software development, logistics, renewable energy, and mechatronics.

Amazon’s announcement placed the investments in the context of its scale in Europe. The company said it invested more than €60 billion across Europe in 2025, its largest annual investment on the continent, and it currently supports more than 1.5 million jobs across Europe, including 230,000 Amazon employees and additional roles tied to its extended workforce and the small businesses that sell through its platform.

From a business perspective, the push underscores how Amazon is using fulfillment automation as a competitive lever, particularly where labor availability, facility utilization, and throughput constraints can limit delivery speed. Robots like Proteus and systems such as STARK also reflect a broader design approach in warehouse robotics, pairing autonomous movement with tools that can assist human workers rather than fully replacing warehouse operations.

Still, Amazon did not provide granular details on how the €10+ billion will be allocated across specific fulfillment centers, or what proportion of the funding will go to new site construction versus upgrades to existing operations. The company also did not disclose cost projections, expected productivity gains, or timelines beyond the stated robotics rollout targets in the announcement.

Looking ahead, the next milestones are the first-half-2027 deployment plans for Proteus in Europe and the expansion of STARK to 15 European sites by 2027. Observers will likely watch how quickly Amazon scales these systems, whether it expands the use of its touch-based Vulcan robot, and whether the company’s productivity gains translate into faster delivery service levels across its European network.