Amazon expands its drone delivery service to nearly 500 cities in the US

Amazon seems ready, finally, to flood the American skies with drones for home deliveries.

On Wednesday, the tech giant announced its plan to expand that delivery system to nearly 500 U.S. cities before the end of the year, in what appears to be a significant turning point for a project that the corporation's founder, Jeff Bezos, first talked about 13 years ago.

The announcement would multiply the fleet of drones currently available by six and accelerate the delivery program by half an hour for many of our products, including food, medicine, cosmetics or electronics. According to David Carbon, vice president of Prime Air, the goal is to reach one million deliveries with drones in 2026, a system with which they hope to revolutionize the company.

So far, however, they have encountered a number of obstacles, from regulatory problems and staff cuts in that division to complaints from neighbors about noise in areas where it is already underway.

Since Bezos committed in 2013 to creating a system to deliver small packages with drones in half an hour or less, Amazon has invested more than $2 billion, without the service yet becoming profitable on a large scale. Now, the digital sales colossus boasts that it is making "thousands of shipments" daily with its drones, serving customers in cities in seven states - Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and Texas -, with plans to begin operating in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Idaho and New York in the coming months.

Prime members will pay $2.99 ​​for shipments of $50 or more and non-subscription customers will pay $4.99, with items that must not exceed two and a half kilos. That means that more than 60% of the products that customers most frequently buy on Amazon are eligible for this service, according to the company.

But they are not alone. Wing, owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company, has already surpassed the one million drone delivery mark through its collaboration with Walmart and Doordash. The Zipline case is even more notable, with two million deliveries. Founded in 2014 in Half Moon Bay, California, the company is valued at more than $7.6 billion.

On paper, the advantages for companies are considerable, starting with increasing the speed of deliveries and continuing with the savings in personnel and transportation that modifying this last section of the delivery entails. The reality has turned out to be very different, at least until now. Starting with the several accidents that have been recorded. In October 2025, two drones collided with a crane in Arizona, including a fire. In Texas, one severed an internet cable and another crashed into an apartment building with the propellers still spinning.

Added to this is a considerable regulatory burden: in the US, any flight that exceeds the operator's visual range requires a certification originally designed for commercial airlines, and the standard that was to replace that system with more agile authorizations is already years behind schedule.