Walmart Expands Drone Delivery Service to Dallas Area Homes

A viral video of a drone dropping a Walmart bag over a Dallas-area home put a face on what the retailer has been quietly building for years: Zipline expanded its drone delivery partnership with Walmart into Mesquite, Texas, a city about 15 miles east of Dallas, where customers can now sign up to receive orders within 30 minutes.

The service runs on Zipline's newest unmanned aerial vehicles, called P2 Zips, which carry up to eight pounds of cargo within a 10-mile radius and can set a package down on a space as small as a table or doorstep. Zipline CEO and co-founder Keller Rinaudo Cliffton described the precision as "dinner plate-level" accuracy. The company, valued at $4.2 billion in a 2023 financing round and ranked 21st on CNBC's 2024 Disruptor 50 list, plans to expand further across the Dallas metropolitan area.

Walmart told CNBC in an email that it has completed more than 120,000 drone deliveries to homes since first making the option available through Zipline and other partners in 2021. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has become the program's proving ground. Service has grown to cover 20 Walmart stores across the DFW region, and by 2024 Walmart had pledged to reach three-quarters of the metroplex by year's end. A subsequent announcement brought the network to stores across more than 30 towns and municipalities in the region through partnerships with both Wing and Zipline.

In June 2025, Wing and Walmart announced plans to push into 100 additional stores and five new metro areas: Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston, Tampa, and Orlando. The partners have committed to reaching more than 270 drone delivery locations by 2027, with expansion cities including Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Miami.

Not every drone delivery partner made it through the scaling period intact. DroneUp, a former Walmart partner, shut down its drone operations in Arizona, Utah, and Florida, saying it would concentrate on the DFW area where the economics for growth were more favorable. Ferguson, a partner representative quoted by Dronelife, described the difficulty of the early phase: "Before we could achieve scale, we had to perfect the delivery experience, ensuring our drones could navigate any backyard and deliver items like eggs without cracks and hot coffee without spills. Today, that innovation supports Wing's seamless logistics partnership with Walmart."

Zipline's path to Walmart's supply chain runs through a surprising origin. The company began by delivering medicines, blood, vaccines, and personal protective equipment by drone to clinics and hospitals in countries where limited infrastructure made timely access difficult. It now operates in Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Japan, and the United States, and counts Sweetgreen, Chipotle, Cleveland Clinic, and Mayo Clinic among its customers alongside Walmart.

The DFW expansion puts the P2 Zip's capabilities directly in front of Walmart's largest hourly associate workforce in the country, where store-level fulfillment operations may increasingly feed into drone dispatch rather than traditional last-mile delivery. Whether that shift translates to changes in picking roles and fulfillment headcount at DFW stores is a question the company has not yet answered publicly.