FedEx Wants to Be a Data Company With Planes

At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, CEO Rajesh Subramaniam said “the recent exponential growth of AI has the potential to be one of the most significant events in human society since the advancement of electric power systems and the introduction of the internet.” He added, “AI is no longer a trend. It’s the next industrial system: a union of compute, energy and labor that will redefine how economies operate and how humanity evolves.”

FedEx transports approximately 17 million packages per day across more than 220 countries and territories and moves more than $2 trillion in goods annually, according to its 2025 Global Economic Impact Report. At its 2026 Investor Day, the company said it generates roughly two petabytes of data per day across its network.

For context, FedEx’s logistics scale sits atop a substantial financial base: the company reported $87.9 billion of revenue in fiscal 2025, while capital spending that year totaled about $4.1 billion (≈4.6% of revenue). Management says it achieved $2.2 billion in DRIVE structural cost reductions in fiscal 2025 and has delivered about $4.0 billion of structural savings since fiscal 2023: figures that make any data-driven efficiency gain immediately material to the company’s margins.

Subramaniam said, “building AI capabilities is not optional. It’s essential.” He added, “intelligence is not an asset. It’s infrastructure: the foundation of the future of global progress, productivity and economic growth.”