Amazon says new warehouse robot can ‘feel’ items, but won’t replace workers

Published

3 months ago

May 7, 2025

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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.

Aaron Parness, Director of Amazon Robotics, shows CNBC’s Katie Tarasov the gripper of its newest robot, Vulcan, at an Amazon warehouse in Spokane, Washington, on April 17, 2025.

Joseph Huerta

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

Technology

Trump says he asked for 20% cut from Nvidia, calls H20 an ‘obsolete’ chip

Published

3 hours ago

August 11, 2025

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Trump says he asked for 20% cut from Nvidia, calls H20 an 'obsolete' chip

U.S. President Donald Trump (L) listens as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks in the Cross Hall of the White House during an event on “Investing in America” on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Andrew Harnik | Getty Images

President Donald Trump on Monday said that he initially asked Nvidia for a 20% cut of the chipmaker’s sales to China, but the number came down to 15% after CEO Jensen Huang negotiated with him.

The comments came after news broke over the weekend that Nvidia agreed to pay the federal government a 15% cut in return for receiving export control licenses that will allow it to once again sell the H20 chip to China and Chinese companies. Nvidia’s Huang visited Trump in the White House on Friday.

“I said, ‘listen, I want 20% if I’m going to approve this for you, for the country,'” Trump said in a press conference in Washington.

Trump said that Nvidia’s H20 is an “old chip that China already has” and is “obsolete.” He compared the H20 chip to Nvidia’s current fastest artificial intelligence chip, which is called Blackwell, and said that he wouldn’t allow those to be sold to China without significant downgrades, such as a 30% to 50% reduction in performance.

“The Blackwell is super-duper advanced. I wouldn’t make a deal with that,” Trump said, adding that it was possible to make a deal for a “somewhat enhanced in a negative way” version of Blackwell.

“That’s the latest and the greatest in the world. Nobody has it. They won’t have it for five years,” Trump said.

One reason for the U.S. export controls is fear that providing advanced chips to China could allow the foreign power to leapfrog the U.S. in AI capabilities. Many have said that could pose a threat to the national security of the U.S.

Trump said that China already has chips with some similar capabilities to the H20.

Huang has said that it is better for U.S. national security if Chinese AI developers use U.S. technology, and that denying them access to Nvidia chips would actually encourage the Chinese chip industry to develop and catch up.

“He’s selling a essentially old chip,” Trump said. “Huawei has a similar chip.”

The H20 is a Chinese-specific chip that has had its performance slowed down. It is related to Nvidia’s H100 and H200 chips that are used in the U.S. The H20 was introduced after the Biden administration implemented export controls on AI chips in 2023.

In April, the Trump administration said it would require a license to export the H20 chip, and in May, Huang said that “effectively closed” the market off to Nvidia. Huang said that Nvidia was expecting to sell about $8 billion in H20 chips in the July quarter before sales were stopped.

“While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide,” an Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC on Monday.

Trump on Monday also said that Huang plans to visit him again to negotiate export licenses for the Blackwell chips.

“I think he’s coming to see me again about that,” Trump said.

A White House official confirmed to CNBC that AMD, the second-place AI chip maker, will also pay 15% to receive an export license for its China-focused AI chip, the Instinct MI308.

WATCH: Nvidia, AMD to pay U.S. 15% of AI chip sales in China to secure export licenses

Technology

Crypto exchange Bullish raises IPO size, seeks nearly $5 billion valuation

Published

3 hours ago

August 11, 2025

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Crypto exchange Bullish raises IPO size, seeks nearly billion valuation

Pavlo Gonchar | SOPA Images | AP

Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish raised the size of its initial public offering.

Bullish is aiming to raise $990 million, offering 30 million shares priced between $32 and $33 apiece, and targeting a valuation of $4.8 billion, according to a Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company, led by former New York Stock Exchange president Tom Farley, had previously marketed 20.3 million shares at a proposed range between $28 and $31 a share and sought a $4.2 billion valuation, per a filing last week.

Bullish granted its underwriters, led by JPMorgan, Jefferies and Citigroup, a 30-day option to sell an additional 4.5 million shares. Bullish stock will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol “BLSH.”

BlackRock and Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management have indicated interest in purchasing up to $200 million of the shares, according to the updated filing.

Bullish, which also owns the crypto media site CoinDesk, is the latest crypto firm to join the public market, reflecting reinvigorated capital markets driven by investor confidence and increasing regulatory support and clarity from Washington. The stablecoin issuer Circle made its highly successful debut in June. In May, Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital uplisted to the Nasdaq and stock and crypto trading app eToro opened trading to the public.

Crypto custody startup BitGo has confidentially filed for a U.S. listing as has Gemini, the crypto exchange run by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

Technology

Amazon tops 100 satellites after weather-delayed Kuiper launch

Published

5 hours ago

August 11, 2025

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Amazon tops 100 satellites after weather-delayed Kuiper launch

After four previous scrubs or delays in a row since August 7th SpaceX launches Amazon KF-02 Kuipeer Satellites after the 5th attempt August 11th 2025 at 8:35 AM SLC-40 Cape Canaveral, Brevard County, Florida USA.

Scott Schilke| SipaUSA |AP

Amazon shipped another batch of internet-beaming satellites into orbit on Monday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, after four previous launch attempts were interrupted by weather issues.

Monday’s launch is the fourth Kuiper mission, and Amazon now has 102 satellites in orbit.

The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 8:35 a.m. ET. Roughly an hour after launch, SpaceX confirmed all 24 of Amazon’s Kuiper satellites were successfully deployed.

The mission was originally scheduled for last Thursday, but SpaceX was forced to scrub the launch, along with three more attempts over the past few days due to rainfall.

For the second time, Amazon turned to Elon Musk‘s SpaceX, its chief competitor in the low-earth orbit satellite market, for help building out its constellation.