This paper examines the relation between a firm’s exposure to automation technologies and its capital structure decision. We show that the automation threat has a positive impact on a firm’s leverage. We explore two effects of automation threat on leverage: first, automation threat compresses the wage premium demanded by workers from the use of financial leverage, which allows firms to increase financial leverage; second, automation threat makes the labor market protection less effective and increases firms’ operating leverage, which allows firms to increase financial leverage. Our empirical findings support both effects. Furthermore, we also tackle the endogeneity of a firm’s capital structure decision by instrumenting a firm’s exposure to automation technology advancement using the robotics adoption in European countries. We show that our results are not driven by any endogeneity concerns. We contribute to the literature of labor economics and finance by making the first attempt to understand how the supply of automation technologies affect corporate capital structure.