up in the air

Walmart picks Houston for expanded drone delivery service

Walmart is bringing drone delivery to Houston.

Courtesy of Walmart

Coming soon to Houston-area skies: drones delivering Walmart purchases to customers.

The retailer is expanding its drone delivery service to five markets: Houston; Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Orlando, Florida; and Tampa, Florida.

Walmart already offers drone deliveries in Dallas-Fort Worth and Bentonville, Arkansas, where it’s based. In DFW, Walmart is adding supercenters to the region’s current 18-store lineup.

The drone service in the five new markets will launch at 100 Walmart supercenters. Walmart has yet to specify when the drone deliveries will begin in the new cities.

“As we look ahead, drone delivery will remain a key part of our commitment to redefining retail. We’re pushing the boundaries of convenience to better serve our customers, making shopping faster and easier than ever before,” said Greg Cathey, senior vice president of Walmart’s U.S. transformation and innovation arm.

Teaming up with drone provider Wing, Walmart delivers purchases to customers’ homes within a six-mile aircraft range of a store.

“This is real drone delivery at scale,” said Adam Woodworth, CEO of Wing, which is owned by Google’s parent company. “People all around the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex have made drone delivery part of their normal shopping habits over the past year. Now we’re excited to share this ultra-fast delivery experience with millions more people across many more U.S. cities.”

Today, Wing makes thousands of Walmart deliveries per week in the DFW and Bentonville markets, with an average order fulfillment time of less than 19 minutes.

In Houston and the other new markets, Walmart customers will be able to choose from thousands of items that can be sent via drone. Wing explains that before completing the checkout process on its delivery app, a Walmart customer can pinpoint a location for their delivery, such as their home’s front yard or backyard.

“Then your items will be packed into a specialized box before a Wing delivery drone takes off at your local Walmart store, retrieves the order, and then cruises up to 65 mph to your home. The drone then gently lowers the package to the ground just minutes after takeoff,” Wing says on its website.

To find out more about the availability of Walmart drone deliveries in the Houston area, visit wing.com/walmart.

walmart drone delivery shopping

training future workers

Meta to bring $115 million AI data center training initiative to Houston

Photo by Joe Holland on Unsplash

The facilities will train the next generation of construction workers.

Meta and Associated Builders and Contractors have entered into a partnership to invest $115 million in training programs for the construction of AI data centers, with a portion of the project launching in Houston.

The companies announced June 8 that they would open America’s Workforce Academies at ABC chapter training centers in Houston; Indianapolis; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Columbus, Ohio.

The academies will offer career readiness and safety training, plus five weeks of hands-on education. Participants who complete the program will be granted a job offer from contractors working on Meta projects.

“The AI revolution is bringing change but also historic opportunities,” Dina Powell McCormick, Meta president and vice-chairman, said in a news release. “Skilled workers electrified rural America one pole at a time. They manned the factories that built the arsenal that won World War II. Now a new generation will pour the foundations and lay the fiber that secures American strength in this new age.”

Overall, the Meta and ABC aim for the academies to build a more sustainable pipeline of skilled construction workers and ensure safety and job readiness for the surging number of data center projects underway.

“This new program is an innovative talent solution that is a critical part of addressing the construction industry’s ongoing workforce shortage and creates an accelerated, new-entrant strategy for job seekers ... The sustained demand for data center construction technicians means the industry needs an all-of-the-above approach to address this shortage and grow the construction talent pool,” Michael Bellaman, ABC president and CEO, added in the release.

In Texas, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has launched or broken ground on data centers in El Paso, Fort Worth and Temple. The company announced in March that it planned to grow its El Paso Data center by 1 gigawatt, representing more than a $10 billion investment.

Apart from Meta, Texas has attracted data center development to power other giants like Google and Amazon in recent years. In turn, Texas has been predicted to become the biggest data center market. Commercial real estate services provider JLL reported this spring that the state could topple Northern Virginia as the world’s largest data-center market by 2030. Similarly, CBRE predicted that Houston's data center capacity could double by 2028.

---

This story was first published on our sister site InnovationMap.