Amazon continued to enhance its delivery speeds and fulfillment network during the second quarter, executives announced alongside the company's financial results on Thursday.

Globally, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) delivered more than 40% of items same-day or overnight in the first half of the year compared to the same period last year. The company also expanded its ultra-fast delivery service, Amazon Now — which promises delivery within 30 minutes or less on thousands of everyday essentials — to 80 additional cities and towns across the United States and several major cities in Egypt.

Amazon Now is now available in nine countries and over 250 cities and towns, including Atlanta, Houston, and Denver. The service has gained significant traction, with gross sales and units sold growing more than 80% quarter-over-quarter and customer count increasing over 60% from the prior quarter, CEO Andy Jassy told analysts.

Faster delivery speeds, combined with a broad product selection on the marketplace, are encouraging consumers to make more purchases on Amazon's platform, Jassy added. Ultra-fast delivery represents Amazon's latest effort to boost delivery speed and retain customers by offering extreme convenience. The company also provides one-hour and three-hour delivery on more than 90,000 products and same-day delivery on millions of items.

The push for faster delivery comes as Walmart, Target, and other major retailers have been investing heavily in their own fulfillment capabilities, intensifying competition in the quick-commerce segment. Walmart has expanded its drone delivery pilot and automated fulfillment centers, while Target has leveraged its store network as fulfillment hubs.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said Amazon made progress optimizing inventory, shortening shipping distances, reducing touches per package, and improving consolidation rates. The company is also expanding its deployment of robotics and automation, technologies that have been central to its logistics operations for years.

Amazon recently surpassed 1 million robots developed, produced, and deployed across its operations network. The milestone reflects a broader industry shift toward warehouse automation as labor costs rise and e-commerce volumes grow.

"We're retrofitting our facilities with our latest generation technology, and we expect to more than double our fleet of robotic arms, like Cardinal and Sparrow, in 2026," Olsavsky said on the earnings call.

Cardinal is a robotic arm that tightly loads packages of up to 50 pounds into carts in a Tetris-like manner. Sparrow is a robotic system that assists employees who aggregate items for customer orders. The arm picks up and moves individual items from containers into specific totes for employees to package. It can lift packages up to 12 pounds and uses computer vision and AI to identify the correct item and place it in the appropriate tote.

In early June, Amazon announced plans to install three types of new robots across its European fulfillment centers as part of a $10 billion modernization plan.

Amazon was able to partially offset rising transportation costs driven by fuel inflation from the Iran war and higher trucking rates by implementing a fuel and logistics surcharge in April for Fulfillment by Amazon customers, Olsavsky said.

"Looking ahead, we see meaningful opportunities to further enhance productivity across our global fulfillment network, all while continuing to raise the bar in delivery speed. While operating margin may fluctuate and progress may not always be linear, we take a deliberate approach to achieving sustained long-term improvement in our cost to serve," he said.

Many merchants are rethinking the speed equation, betting that most customers will be satisfied with predictable delivery times rather than ultra-fast service.

"For years, retailers have treated faster shipping as the way to compete with Amazon. That's becoming a harder strategy to justify as fulfillment costs rise and logistics networks become more fragmented. Amazon has the scale and logistics infrastructure to absorb rising fulfillment and delivery costs, but most retailers don't have that luxury. Brands don't need to match the delivery speed of industry giants; they need to focus on giving customers a reason to come back after the package ships," said Eric Kobe, CEO of Route, a post-purchase tech platform, via email.

Amazon's stock surged 15% by midday Friday as cloud services drove outsized earnings gains. Amazon Web Services generated $42 billion in revenue during the second quarter. Overall, Amazon reported a 20% increase in net sales to $200.6 billion. Operating income reached $27.5 billion, up 43% year-over-year.