Dive Brief:
- Amazon is building a robotics fulfillment center in Wilmington, North Carolina, which is slated to open in 2026, according to a March 12 press release.
- The building will be constructed on a 650,000 square foot lot and feature more than 3 million square feet of floor space across its four-and-a-half floors. The e-commerce giant broke ground on the project last fall.
- “North Carolina has proven itself to be a great place for Amazon to do business and gives us the opportunity to better serve our customers in the region,” said Holly Sullivan, VP of worldwide economic development at Amazon, in the release.
Dive Insight:
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company remains “squarely focused” on improving the cost efficiency of its fulfillment network on Amazon’s Q4 2024 earnings call in February. The comments came as Amazon has been upgrading its fulfillment network after shifting to a regional model in recent years.
Jassy said in October that the company’s “hundreds of changes” to its 15 inbound fulfillment facilities aim to spread inventory across the centers by 25% year over year.
As part of its fulfillment overhaul, Amazon is turning to robotics technology and other forms of automation to save costs and improve production. The company opened a robotics fulfillment center in Shreveport, Louisiana after incorproating the technology into a facility in Houston in 2023.
“Since we've been pretty substantially integrating robotics into our fulfillment network over the last many years, we have seen cost savings and we've seen productivity improvements and we've seen safety improvements,” Jassy said.
The company plans to continue investing in robotics within its fulfillment and transportation network, Jassy said.
“But I think this will be a many-year effort as we continue to tune different parts of our fulfillment network where we can use robotics,” Jassy said. “And we actually don't think there are that many things that we can't improve the experience with robotics.”
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