At its Delivering the Future event Wednesday, Amazon announced plans for new robot-powered delivery warehouses. The first "next-generation fulfillment center" is located in Shreveport, Louisiana. The 3-million-square-foot warehouse spans five floors, constituting the rough equivalent of 55 football fields, according to the company.

It marks the highpoint of Amazon's efforts in robotics, which dates back over a decade to its 2012 Kiva acquisition. Its retail approach has largely gone about assimilating robots into existing worklfows that will not disturb regular operations. With the new model, the company seems to be bringing a more bottom-up greenfield approach to robotics and AI.

It hasn't given how many robots it is fielding, but promises to start with 10 times the capacity of a traditional fulfillment center. In any case, the company already has almost a million robotic systems installed in centers around the United States.

Along with the Kiva-style autonomous mobile robots, the company is also deploying the inventory robotic arms Robin, Cardinal, and Sparrow, as well as Sequoia, described as "a state-of-the-art multilevel containerized inventory system that makes it faster and safer for employees to store and pick goods. In our next-generation facility, Sequoia can hold more than 30 million items.".

This is 5x the size of the first Sequoia inventory system the company deployed in Houston around this time last year.

Probably the biggest hire in August will be to deploy AI throughout the system-will be by the founders of Covariant, Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan. This Louisiana fulfillment center will prove to be the test bed for these robots to work together. That's been a tough nut to crack: hardware-agnostic platforms and communications between systems in robots became somewhat of a pipe dream until recently.

Amazon was quick to point out that people will be in control of these systems, too. The company said the Louisiana plant would eventually create 2,500 jobs.