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Economy

Amazon to expand drone deliveries to suburban Chicago, Atlanta

Amazon plans to launch drone deliveries in suburban Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland and Syracuse before December, taking Prime Air to 500 US cities and towns and tripling its current reach.

Source: The Business Times Singapore · August 19, 2026 at 11:51 AM · AI-assisted report

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NEW YORK, 19 AUGUST 2026 —

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Amazon plans to launch drone deliveries in suburban Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland and Syracuse before December, taking Prime Air to 500 US cities and towns and tripling its current reach.

Market Impact

The push from four new warehouse hubs will let the e-commerce giant serve roughly 30 million Americans by the end of 2026, the company said on Wednesday. Prime members pay US$2.99 per drone drop, a fee waived on orders of US$50 or more; non-members are charged US$4.99.

Amazon’s in-house MK30 drone—a six-propeller machine that takes off and lands like a helicopter—has a 7.5-mile range and has already made “hundreds of thousands” of deliveries this year, Amazon said. That compares with only a handful of flights from shuttered test sites in California and Texas just a few years ago.

Founder Jeff Bezos first outlined drone ambitions in a 2013 interview, predicting deliveries within five years. A decade of redesigns and test-flight crashes followed as the company fine-tuned the technology and chose suburban corridors where airspace and safety rules are less crowded than in dense urban cores.

Prime Air is not the only service expanding. Walmart, which uses partner drones launched from store parking lots, said late last year it would cover metro areas home to about one in ten Americans. Alphabet’s Wing unit, which supplies Walmart, told reporters in June it would operate from more than 270 Walmart locations and reach over 40 million people by 2025.

Amazon’s planned roll-out would put it on a similar trajectory, putting drone delivery within reach of 30 million people by the end of 2026.

Related: Amazon

Reporting based on The Business Times Singapore. Figures and claims are subject to revision as the story develops. DomainFork publishes editorial context, not investment advice — see our editorial standards.