Amazon on August 19, 2026 said its Prime Air drone service is on track to reach nearly 500 US cities and towns by year-end, a sixfold expansion of the current 11-metro footprint that puts ultrafast delivery within reach of tens of millions of customers.
Where the drones are flying
Prime Air currently operates from 11 sites across seven states — Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and Texas — with each site covering about 175 square miles. Amazon named Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise as the next metros to come online, with more to follow later this year. In Europe the service just went live in Darlington, England, its first non-US location.
MK30 and Detect-and-Avoid do the heavy lifting
The scale-up rides on Amazon's newer MK30 drone, which delivers packages weighing 5 pounds or less in as fast as 30 minutes. Prime Air holds an FAA Part 135 air carrier certificate and pairs it with the company's Detect-and-Avoid stack, which lets the drones monitor their airspace and land safely in unexpected conditions. "We've already delivered hundreds of thousands of packages to customers by drone this year," said David Carbon, vice president of Amazon Prime Air.
The race with Wing and Zipline heats up
The expansion lands as delivery rivals move quickly on volume: Alphabet's Wing continues to build out through Walmart, and Uber and Zipline are targeting 1 million drone deliveries a day by 2029. Amazon's push also arrives ahead of a September tariff hike on imported drones, and coincides with a wave of edge-compute upgrades such as NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano 2 that make suburban drone operations cheaper to scale.
Reporting based on coverage from Amazon, ABC News, and TechSpot.