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Hai Robotics has been selected to supply more than 1,500 rack-climbing warehouse robots for a new European e-commerce fulfillment center operated by an unnamed leading fashion retailer.
The Shenzhen-based warehouse automation company announced the project on Sept. 8, calling it the world's largest deployment of rack-climbing warehouse robots. The customer has not been publicly identified, but Hai said the retailer already operates multiple HaiPick systems across Europe and is expanding that relationship for the new facility.
When built out, the system is expected to use more than 1,500 HaiPick Climb robots inside a single integrated automation system across roughly 30,000 square meters of automated fulfillment space. The site is designed for 1.2 million double-deep storage locations and throughput of more than 24,000 totes per hour.
HaiPick Climb Brings Vertical Automation to Fashion Fulfillment
HaiPick Climb is Hai Robotics' rack-climbing automated storage and retrieval system, built around goods-to-person workflows. Instead of moving entire shelves across a warehouse floor or using humanoid robots to handle items, the system sends compact robots through racking infrastructure to retrieve totes or cartons and deliver them to workstations.
The planned European fashion facility is a large-scale logistics automation project built around the practical constraints of e-commerce: high SKU counts, fast order cycles, seasonal demand spikes, returns, and the need to pack more inventory into expensive warehouse space, instead of a walking-robot pilot or a speculative physical AI demonstration.
Hai's system uses robots known as HaiClimbers. The robots can move beneath and between racks, climb rail structures, retrieve totes from vertical storage, and deliver them to picking stations. HaiClimbers can travel at up to 4 meters per second on the ground and climb at up to 1 meter per second. The system supports double-deep storage, allowing robots to reach back-slot inventory rather than only the first accessible tote.
The double-deep design is central to the scale of the planned system. The announced 1.2 million-location figure reflects a high-density storage strategy that combines vertical racking, narrow aisles, and robot access across a large fulfillment footprint.
The Project Pushes Rack-Climbing Robots Into Enterprise Scale
Hai Robotics said the new fulfillment center will support growing online order volumes through a goods-to-person operation powered by upgraded HaiPick Climb double-deep systems. The company framed the project as evidence that large retailers are moving toward highly scalable robotic automation for high-volume fulfillment environments.
"This project demonstrates the continued shift toward highly scalable robotic automation within large-scale fulfillment operations," Peter Guan, general manager of Hai Robotics EMEA, said in the company's announcement. "Being selected to deliver the world's largest deployment of rack-climbing warehouse robots is an important milestone for Hai Robotics."
The system's published throughput target, above 24,000 totes per hour, refers to tote flow through the automation system, not a fully lights-out warehouse. In goods-to-person operations, robots bring inventory to workstations, where human operators or downstream equipment typically complete item handling, order picking, packing, or related tasks. The automation reduces walking, compresses storage, and accelerates inventory movement, but people remain part of the fulfillment process.
Notably, Hai's standard product claims give context for the scale of this new announcement.
Its HaiPick Climb materials say robots can deliver totes to stations in under two minutes and that the system can reach up to 4,000 totes per hour within a 1,000-square-meter reference footprint. The company also says HaiClimber fleets can scale to as many as 3,000 robots.
That makes the planned 1,500-plus-robot European deployment unusually large, but still within the system envelope Hai publicly markets.
A Different Robotics Story Than Humanoid Warehouses
The announcement lands during a period when much of the robotics conversation is centered on humanoids, especially in manufacturing and warehouse-adjacent environments. Hai's project points to a less theatrical but more immediately scaled form of robotics adoption: purpose-built systems that solve narrow, repetitive logistics problems inside existing warehouse economics.
Fashion and e-commerce are natural targets for that kind of automation. Retailers must manage broad SKU catalogs, size and color variants, volatile demand, frequent returns, and fast shipping expectations. Dense tote storage can reduce the need for additional floor space, while goods-to-person stations can help operators process orders without walking long distances through aisles.
HaiPick Climb is also positioned as simpler to install and scale than traditional crane-based automated storage and retrieval systems. Hai says the system uses standard cross-bar racking, narrow aisle layouts, modular workstations, and HaiQ software to coordinate storage, orders, and robot assignments. Additional robots, racks, or workstations can be added over time as volumes increase.
The European fashion project also builds on earlier HaiPick Climb deployments in the region. In 2025, Hai announced what it described as the first HaiPick Climb deployment in Europe, at a logistics hub in Poland for a leading e-commerce company. That site used 10-meter-high racks, stored more than 100,000 locations within more than 4,000 square meters, and processed more than 1,400 totes per hour, according to Hai.
The newly announced fashion fulfillment center is a much larger version of the same basic thesis: use climbing robots and dense vertical storage to increase throughput without relying on a more rigid warehouse automation architecture.
Hai Robotics Extends Its European Warehouse Footprint
Founded in Shenzhen in 2016, Hai Robotics helped popularize the autonomous case-handling robot category and has expanded across global warehouse automation markets. The company's HaiPick systems combine robots, racking, workstations, and fleet orchestration software for industries including apparel, e-commerce, retail, electronics, and third-party logistics.
The unnamed European fashion retailer gives Hai a major enterprise-scale customer for HaiPick Climb. The company has said the system is designed for customers that need higher storage density, fast fulfillment, and flexible deployment across new or existing facilities.
The project also shows where warehouse robotics is already reaching meaningful unit counts. A 1,500-robot climbing fleet in one fulfillment center is larger than many humanoid robot programs that receive more public attention. These robots matter because they are applied at scale to a logistics environment where storage density, tote movement, and order throughput have measurable business value, not because they look human.
