There’s a new warehouse robot at Amazon that has a sense of touch, allowing it to handle a job previously only done by humans. Amazon unveiled the robot, called Vulcan, Wednesday at an event in Germany.

CNBC got an exclusive first look at Vulcan in April, as it stowed items into tall, yellow bins at a warehouse in Spokane, Washington. An up-close look at the “hand” of the robot reveals how it can feel the items it touches using an AI-powered sensor to determine the precise pressure and torque each object needs.

This innovative gripper helps give Vulcan the ability to manipulate 75% of the 1 million unique items in inventory at the Spokane warehouse. Amazon has used other robotic arms inside its warehouses since 2021, but those rely on cameras for detection and suction for grasp, limiting what types of objects they can handle. 

Vulcan can also operate 20 hours a day, according to Aaron Parness, who heads up the Amazon Robotics team that developed the machine.

Still, Parness told CNBC that instead of replacing people in its warehouses, Vulcan will create new, higher skilled jobs that involve maintaining, operating, installing and building the robots. 

When asked if Amazon will fully automate warehouses in the future, Parness said, “not at all.”

“I don’t believe in 100% automation,” he said. “If we had to get Vulcan to do 100% of the stows and picks, it would never happen. You would wait your entire life. Amazon understands this.”

The goal is for Vulcan to handle 100% of the stowing that happens in the top rows of bins, which are difficult for people to reach, Parness said. Limiting workers to stowing on mid-height shelves, the so-called power zone, could lower the chance for worker injuries. Amazon has long struggled with injury rates far higher than those at other warehouses, though the company claims those rates have improved significantly. 

“We have a ladder that we have to step onto several dozen times a day during your ten hour shift. There is a lot of reaching. We have to lunge and squat. So it’s a lot of tough body mechanics,” said Kari Freitas Hardy, an Amazon worker in Spokane. “As a picker, if I had an innovation like this where I could have stayed within my power zone, my days would have been just so much easier.”

Amazon said Vulcan is operating at about the same speed as a human worker and can handle items up to 8 pounds. It operates behind a fence, sequestered from human workers to reduce the risk of accidents.

Experts agree that humans will work alongside robots in warehouses like Amazon’s for the foreseeable future.

“Whereas if you build a terribly complicated automated system and it breaks, then everything stops,” said Bill Ray, a researcher at Gartner. “Taking out the last human is so expensive. It’s so disruptive. It would be a huge investment and an enormous risk.”

Freitas Hardy recently transitioned from picking items to working with the robots. She’s one of the 350,000 workers Amazon said it’s spent $1.2 billion to upskill since 2019.

“It would be many decades off, to have them just come in and take over, so at this point it’s more exciting if you ask me, to see the growth potential because that is where it does increase jobs on the back side,” Freitas Hardy said.

Although Freitas Hardy said she isn’t making more money in her new role, Amazon said others who participate in its Mechatronics and Robotics Apprenticeship program typically receive pay increases of about 40%.

Amazon said the team that developed Vulcan has grown from a handful of people to more than 250 employees in the three years since the project began. Amazon wouldn’t disclose how much it cost to develop Vulcan, but Parness said it represents a big business opportunity.

“Vulcan can interact with the world in a more human-like manner, and that gives us a lot more process paths that we can use automation to bring down the cost that our customer pays, and the speed with which we can deliver those products to our customers,” Parness said.

Another big return on investment may come from robots making fewer mistakes than humans.

“Product returns are incredibly high and product returns are incredibly expensive,” Gartner’s Ray said.  “Some of them will be because the wrong thing was put in the box. And if you can reduce that, that’s a real cost saving straight away.”

Meanwhile, Amazon’s humanoid robot Digit has yet to bring operational efficiency. Amazon announced in 2023 that it was testing the Agility Robotics bipedal robot to help organize and move totes, but it’s yet to deploy Digit at scale.

When asked if Vulcan indicates that robots have moved from gimmick to real world application, Parness said, “It doesn’t matter if the robot has legs or wheels or it’s bolted to the floor. I think the thing that makes the robot useful is having that sense of touch so that it can interact in high contact and high clutter environments. That’s the tipping point for me, and I think we’re right there.”

For now, Vulcan is only in full operation at the Spokane warehouse. Another version of Vulcan that can pick specific items from inventory is being tested in Hamburg, Germany. Amazon said it plans to add Vulcan in more U.S. and German facilities in 2026.

Watch the video for an in-depth look at exactly how Vulcan works: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/05/06/meet-vulcan-the-first-amazon-robot-with-a-sense-of-touch.html

Data storage firm Seagate is working to develop a 100-terabyte hard drive by 2030, touting blistering demand from data centers for the 70-year-old technology in the artificial intelligence boom.

BS Teh, Seagate’s chief commercial officer, told CNBC that the company is aiming to launch such a drive — which would have about three times the capacity of the firm’s top-of-the-line hard drives — by 2030. The largest hard disk drive Seagate currently produces is the 36-terabyte Exos M model, which it launched in January.

“You may be thinking, ‘Who would need it?'” Teh said, referring to the idea of a 100-terabyte hard drive. “Well, plenty.”

“I think there’s definitely strong demand,” he added. “This is a key enabler for the industry to be able to deliver the storage capacity that the market needs, because there’s no other technology that’s able to produce this capacity of storage technology to meet the growth that the market needs.”

Seagate has been touting itself as more of an AI player in recent years amid the rise of foundational models like those being developed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. In the computer hardware market, the AI boom has largely benefited players like Nvidia which make the graphics processing units needed for training and running AI models.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi last week told employees “it is what it is” at a heated all-hands meeting after the company announced it would increase its in-office requirements and change benefits.

The ride-sharing company informed employees on April 28 that they will be required to come into the office three days a week, up from two, starting in June, CNBC reported. Uber also changed the eligibility for its month-long paid sabbatical benefit, raising the requirement from five years at the company to eight years. The company also informed some employees who had been previously approved for remote work that they would be required to start coming in.

Khosrowshahi defended the policy changes against feisty employees who peppered him with questions and criticism at the company meeting and on Uber’s internal forum, according to audio and correspondence obtained by CNBC. 

“If you’re here for a sabbatical and this change causes you to change your mind, it is what it is,” Khosrowshahi told employees at the April 29 all-hands meeting. “I’m sorry about that. The reason we want you to be here is the impact on the company. The learning here. We recognize some of these changes are going to be unpopular with folks. This is a risk we decided to take.”

The clash inside Uber highlights the growing tension between tech workers and tech management. Workers for years were drawn to Silicon Valley for its idealistic values, perks and job security, but since 2022, tech companies have cut back on benefits and conducted on-going rounds of layoffs.

Google, for example, informed some employees who were previously approved for remote work that they needed to return to the office if they want to avoid getting caught in layoffs, CNBC reported last month.  

Being in person more frequently is better for collaboration, innovation and company culture, Uber told CNBC in a statement.

“It’s hardly a surprise that not everyone was thrilled about changes to remote work and sabbatical policies,” the company said. “But the job of leadership is to do what’s in the best interest of our customers and shareholders.”

After Uber announced the changes in a memo last week, employees flooded the company’s internal Slido forum with questions and comments.

“The Slido essentially has been invaded by questions about the changes we’ve made,” Khosrowshahi said at the beginning of meeting, adding that the questions had been consolidated.

“How is five years of service not a tenured employee? Especially when burnout is rampant in the org,” a highly-rated comment from one employee said, adding that they had already paid for a trip for their upcoming sabbatical.

Khosrowshahi said Uber is a “Gen-AI powered company” that needs to be on its A game. He said employees should be more interested in learning and their impact on the company than on its benefits, which spurred more employee pushback.

Some questions asked if Uber made policy changes in hopes that it would force some people to quit.

“It has nothing to do in terms of a need to drive attrition or layoffs,” said Khosrowshahi, adding that the changes had nothing to do with cost cutting. “None of that is planned. The business is operating really, really well. But listen, good isn’t good enough for us. We have to be great as a company.”

Uber will report its first quarter financial results Wednesday.

After the all-hands meeting, Uber Chief People Officer Nikki Krishnamurthy sent out a memo saying some employee comments on the meeting broadcast “crossed the line into unprofessional and disrespectful.” 

“That’s not O.K., and we will be speaking with the employees who made them,” Krishnamurthy wrote, according to the memo which CNBC viewed. “Through good times and bad, we are open with each other. Yet when we see behavior like this, it makes it harder to continue being open in the same way.”

Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office and the rest of the week could be spent working remotely for “individual productivity,” according to a now-removed blog post. 

“Our business also exists in the real world, on the streets of thousands of cities, and it’s important we stay connected to the places we serve,” Krishnamurthy wrote at the time.

On the company forum, several employees questioned the change to three days in-office, citing insufficient meeting rooms and work space, according to comments viewed by CNBC.

“It’s a challenge every anchor day to even find a place to sit with your team,” one employee comment said. 

The goal of anchor days is “to get as many people in the office as possible,” Khosrowshahi said, adding that Uber will be keeping track of employee attendance.

Krishnamurthy addressed the concerns about office space at the company meeting, announcing that Uber is adding 700,000 square feet of office space between its San Francisco Mission Bay and Seattle offices. The additional space will go toward more meeting rooms and cafeterias, said Krishnamurthy, adding the retrofitting will be in construction through 2026.

WATCH: Uber raises in-office requirement to 3 days, claws back remote workers