Wing will spend up to $125 million on a Fort Worth drone plant built for tens of thousands of aircraft a year

Wing, the Alphabet-owned drone delivery company, will invest up to $125 million in manufacturing over the next two years at a new 15,000-square-foot facility in Fort Worth, Texas, it said on Nov. 6. The company says the plant will have the capacity to build "tens of thousands of aircraft each year" and should create up to 100 manufacturing jobs. The same money also supports research and engineering in California and the communities where Wing flies, DRONELIFE reports.

That factory is built for a network Wing does not have yet. Today the company flies from more than 70 sites and has made more than one million home deliveries in the US this year, it says. Its 2027 goal is to reach more than 40 million Americans in nearly 20 US markets. Wing ties the investment to the upcoming BVLOS rule, the framework for routine flights beyond the operator's line of sight. The FAA's Part 108 rule for those flights is still a proposal, DRONELIFE notes. Wing gave no opening date for the plant, so tens of thousands a year is a ceiling it has set itself. Building it before the rule is final is a bet that the company with the aircraft takes the stores when the rule arrives.

Walmart's two drone contractors now both spend on production

Wing runs drones at nearly 70 Walmart locations, and the partnership is set to grow to more than 270 stores, with seven new markets from San Diego and Phoenix to Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area, the Fort Worth Report says. A day earlier, Zipline raised $1.5 billion and agreed with Walmart to launch 300 more sites on top of the 21 the two run today, TechCrunch reported. Zipline says the money will expand its US manufacturing.

Walmart is lining up roughly 300 drone sites with each company, and both now say the next step is building aircraft. Zipline's raise is 12 times Wing's two-year budget, but Wing starts from more than three times as many Walmart locations.

The factory will sit where the two already overlap. Wing began delivering in Fort Worth in June 2024 from the Walmart on North Beach Street and now serves 19 Walmart stores in the area, according to the Fort Worth Report. Zipline, which also flies for Walmart in North Texas, says it has made more than one million deliveries in Dallas-Fort Worth this year.