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
A slogan related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is displayed on a screen in Intel pavilion, during the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 16, 2024.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
Big Tech is doubling down on investing billions in India, drawn by its abundance of resources for building data centers, a large talent and digital user pool, and market opportunity.
In under 24 hours, Microsoft and Amazon pledged more than $50 billion toward India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, while Intel on Monday announced plans to make chips in the country to capitalize on its growing PC demand and speedy AI adoption.
While India trails the U.S. and China in the race to develop a native AI foundational model, and lacks a large domestic AI infrastructure company, it wants to leverage its expertise in the information technology sector to create and deploy AI applications at enterprise level, also offering Big Tech companies a huge opportunity.
Having a model or computing is not enough for any enterprise to use AI effectively, and it requires companies making application layer and a large talent pool to deploy them, S. Krishnan, secretary at India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, told CNBC.
Stanford University ranks India among the top four countries along with the U.S., China and the UK in the global and national AI vibrancy ranking. GitHub, a community of developers, has ranked India at the top with the global share of 24% of all projects.
India’s opportunity lies more in “developing applications” which will be used to drive revenues for AI companies, Krishnan said.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced $17.5 billion in investment in the country, spread over 4 years, aimed at expanding hyperscale infrastructure, embedding AI into national platforms, and advancing workforce readiness.
“This scale of capex gives Microsoft first‑mover advantage in GPU‑rich data centers while making Azure the preferred platform for India’s AI workloads, as well as deepening alignment with the government’s AI public infrastructure push,” said Tarun Pathak, research Director at Counterpoint Research.
Amazon on Wednesday announced plans to invest over $35 billion, on top of the $40 billion it has already invested in the country.
Over the past few months, AI and tech majors such as OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have offered their tools for free to millions in India, with Google also firming up its plans to invest $15 billion toward building data center capacity for a new AI hub in southern India.
“India combines a huge digital user base, rapidly growing cloud and AI demand, and a high-talent IT ecosystem that can build and consume AI at scale, making it more than just a market for users and instead a core engineering and deployment hub,” Pathak said.
Data center opportunity
India has several advantages when it comes to building data centers. Markets such as Japan, Australia, China and Singapore in the Asia Pacific region have matured. Singapore, one of the oldest data center hubs in the region, has limited room to deploy large-scale data centers due to land availability issues.
India has abundant space for large-scale data center developments. When compared with data center hubs in Europe, power costs in India are relatively low. Coupled with India’s growing renewable energy capacity — critical for power-hungry data centers — and the economics begin to look compelling.
Local demand, fueled by the rise of e-commerce — a major driver of data center growth in recent years — and potential new rules for storing social media data, strengthens the case.
Put simply: India is entering a sweet spot where global cloud providers, AI players, and domestic digitalization all converge to create one of the world’s hottest data center markets.
“India is a pivotal market and one of the fastest‑growing regions for AI spending in Asia Pacific,” said Deepika Giri, associate vice president and head of research, big data & AI, at International Data Corporation.
“A major gap, and therefore a significant opportunity, lies in the shortage of suitable compute infrastructure for running AI models,” she added. Big Tech is looking to capitalize on the infrastructure opportunity in India by investing heavily in the cloud and data center space.
Global companies are expanding capacities closer to service bases in IT cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune from traditional centers like Mumbai and Chennai which are closer to landing cables, as they build data centers in India for the world, Krishnan said.
— CNBC’s Dylan Butts, Amitoj Singh contributed to this report.
Illustration of the SK Hynix company logo seen displayed on a smartphone screen.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
South Korea’s SK Hynix on Wednesday confirmed that it is weighing a U.S. listing as the memory chipmaker’s valuation soars on global demand for artificial intelligence hardware.
The company at the center of the AI infrastructure boom said in a regulatory filing that it was “reviewing various measures to enhance corporate value, including a U.S. stock market listing utilizing treasury shares,” while noting that no final decision has been made.
A U.S. listing would give American investors direct access to SK Hynix shares, which have surged nearly 230% so far this year in trading in Seoul on the back of strong AI demand.
The Korea Exchange on Tuesday asked SK Hynix to address a Korea Economic Daily report that the company had received proposals to list about 2.4% of its shares as American depositary receipts (ADRs) backed by treasury stock.
ADRs are tradable certificates issued by U.S. banks that represent shares in a foreign company. While they tend to trade with lower liquidity than a full U.S. listing, which can deter some investors, ADRs use existing shares rather than new stock, preserving value for existing shareholders.
SK Hynix holds treasury shares equivalent to about 2.4% of its issued stock, according to the company’s investor relations website.
Shares of SK Hynix rose 4% on Wednesday following its statement, before paring gains on Thursday, trading over 2% lower.
The company has cemented its lead in high-bandwidth memory chips, which are used in Nvidia’s AI processors.
A U.S. listing could help narrow valuation gaps between the company and U.S.-listed memory rival Micron Technology, as well as Samsung Electronics.
SK Hynix has also been committing significant capital at home and abroad to expand its supply capacity, as it races to keep up with growing AI demand.
The firm has committed nearly $4 billion to an advanced packaging fab in Indiana, aligning with Washington’s aim to expand domestic chip production.
SK Hynix is also set to benefit from the government’s growing support of the local semiconductor industry.
South Korea is considering building a 4.5 trillion won ($3.06 billion) foundry, funded by state and private capital to nurture local chipmakers amid growing demand for AI chips, according to a Reuters report on Wednesday.
The report added that South Korean President Lee Jae Myung met with executives from chipmakers, including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, on the same day to discuss plans to maintain the country’s lead in memory chips and support its local chip manufacturing.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reacts while speaking during a press conference following the Federal Open Markets Committee meeting at the Federal Reserve on Dec. 10, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
It ended up being a “hawkish cut,” as expected. Still, investors managed to find a few gifts tucked betweenthe lumps of coal.
Even though the U.S. Federal Reserve lowered interest rates on Wednesday stateside, two regional bank presidents — Jeffrey Schmid of Kansas City and Austan Goolsbee of Chicago — wanted rates to stand pat.
Their cautioned was echoed in the Fed’s “dot plot” of rate projection, which showed officials penciling in just one cut in 2026 and another for 2027.
Even the Fed’s rate statement was repurposed from the December 2024 meeting, which ushered in a nine-month period without cuts until September this year.
Why, then, did U.S. markets rise after the meeting?
The biggest surprise was the Fed’s announcement that it would begin purchasing $40 billion in Treasury bills, starting Friday. That move increases the money supply in the economy. In other words, it’s a stealthy way to ease conditions, which helps support financial markets.
Next, Chair Jerome Powell dismissed speculation about future hikes.
“I don’t think that a rate hike … is anybody’s base case at this point,” Powell said. “I’m not hearing that.”
Fed officials also see the U.S economy as remaining resilient. Collectively, they increased their forecast for economic expansion in 2026 to 2.3% from an earlier estimate of 1.8% in September.
“We have an extraordinary economy,” said Powell.
And the markets may be setting up for an extraordinary finish to the year.
“The last interest rate decision of 2025 has essentially paved the way for a Santa Claus rally to end the year, and the S&P 500 is poised to exceed the 7,000 milestone in the next few weeks,” said José Torres, senior economist at Interactive Brokers.
For investors, that would count as a very decent Christmas surprise.
— CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.
What you need to know today
And finally…
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the U.S. economy and affordability at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, U.S. Dec. 9, 2025.
U.S. President Donald Trump has once again provoked outrage among his European allies, describing them as “weak” in an interview with Politico published Tuesday. Criticizing the region’s response to the war in Ukraine, Trump said: “I think they don’t know what to do.”
That comment will be jarring for Europe after its efforts to support Ukraine — efforts which Trump has frequently downplayed. Instead, Europe has had to watch on as U.S. officials have held talks with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts on a draft peace plan for Ukraine, without a seat at the table.
