The numbers come first: Amazon said Wednesday its Prime Air service will expand to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026 — a sixfold increase from its current footprint. The company currently operates drone delivery from 11 locations and plans to add markets including Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Syracuse, N.Y. Its drones can deliver millions of eligible products weighing up to five pounds in as little as 30 minutes.
Prime Air Vice President David Carbon said Wednesday that Amazon has delivered hundreds of thousands of packages by drone this year. That remains a sliver of the nearly 20 million packages Amazon delivers each day in the U.S., according to market research firm ShipMatrix. The gap between those two figures is precisely the opportunity the industry is now racing to close.
The vision is not new. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unveiled the company's delivery drones on 60 Minutes in 2013 and predicted drone deliveries could arrive within four to five years. Regulatory hurdles, technical setbacks, and noise complaints from residents pushed that timeline well past his original estimate. The pool incident in Richmond, Texas — where a drone dropped a package straight into homeowner Lindsey Austen's backyard pool — is a reminder that the technology still carries real-world risk.
DoorDash is moving on a parallel track. The company recently launched DoorDash Air after receiving a Federal Aviation Administration certification allowing it to operate its own commercial drone delivery service rather than relying solely on outside partners. Harrison Shih, head of DoorDash Air, said in a statement provided to Fortune: 'We want drone delivery to work for any merchant, anywhere. Advances in hardware, compute, and AI are creating extraordinary new capabilities for local commerce, and becoming a certified air carrier accelerates everything we're building.' DoorDash has completed tens of thousands of drone deliveries to date, compared with more than 10 billion orders across its broader network.
Uber is taking a different route. Rather than building aircraft itself, it announced a strategic partnership Monday with Zipline, a drone delivery company most recently valued at $7.6 billion. Uber is investing an undisclosed amount in Zipline, and the partnership comes with an ambitious target: 1 million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029. Zipline, meanwhile, told Fortune the number of businesses offering delivery through its service grew 13-fold in the first half of 2026. The company now operates in Dallas, Houston, Cleveland, and Northwest Arkansas, with Phoenix and Austin expected to follow later this year, and says it currently makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 20 seconds.
Zipline estimates there are already 5.5 billion instant deliveries annually in the U.S., excluding Amazon, UPS, and FedEx. If demand seen in Dallas-Fort Worth were replicated nationwide, the company projects that could translate to demand for 55 billion deliveries a year. Walmart, for its part, told Fortune it is approaching 2 million drone deliveries, up from the 1 million milestone it previously announced.
CEO Times take: What is unfolding in American skies is a textbook free-enterprise race — private capital, competing platforms, and hard-won regulatory clearances replacing years of government-paced delay. The FAA certification DoorDash secured, the Uber-Zipline capital partnership, and Amazon's sixfold expansion all point to the same conclusion: when Washington steps back and lets the market set the pace, innovation scales. The consumer wins on speed and cost; the taxpayer is not footing the bill. The drone that landed in Lindsey Austen's pool is a footnote. The 55-billion-delivery projection is the headline.
