Alphabet's Wing Picks Fort Worth for a $125 Million Drone Factory Built for Tens of Thousands of Aircraft a Year
Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery company, will invest $125 million over two years in a 15,000-square-foot Fort Worth manufacturing facility able to produce tens of thousands of delivery aircraft annually - its first dedicated U.S. factory, feeding a Walmart network planned to reach more than 270 stores and 40 million people.
FORT WORTH - Drone delivery is getting a factory in Fort Worth. Wing, the drone delivery business of Google parent Alphabet, said it will invest $125 million to build a 15,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Fort Worth over the next two years, FreightWaves reported - a plant able to produce tens of thousands of unmanned aircraft each year. Trade coverage put the expected employment at up to 100 manufacturing jobs. It is Wing's first dedicated U.S. manufacturing facility.
The scale is the story. Wing operates from more than 70 sites and currently runs limited service in five metropolitan areas - one of them Dallas-Fort Worth - and it is working to expand to nearly 20 U.S. markets next year, making drone delivery available to more than 40 million people through its partnership with Walmart, across a network the partners say will stretch to more than 270 store locations. Wing's aircraft cruise at up to 60 miles per hour, carry up to five pounds, and the company says it has made more than 1 million residential deliveries so far, usually within 30 minutes.
The Fort Worth plant is a bet on a rule that has not landed yet. The Federal Aviation Administration's rulemaking on beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight - under White House review since July - is expected to let operators scale delivery broadly instead of flying under individual waivers, and Wing said the upcoming U.S. rules will serve as a trigger for widespread expansion. The competitive clock is ticking: Walmart last week also announced a nationwide delivery network operated by Zipline from 300 store locations, and Zipline said it raised $1.5 billion to ramp up its own manufacturing.
What Wing has not disclosed is the factory's street address, a production start date, or how the $125 million splits between Texas and the research and engineering work the company says some of it will support in California. The figures in this story - the investment, the tens of thousands of aircraft a year, the up-to-100 jobs - are the company's announced targets. Fort Worth, which already flies Wing deliveries from local Walmart stores, will be where North Texas learns whether the targets become an assembly line.
