When Amazon opened its mega-warehouse on Boxwood Road near Newport, where robots haul products across five warehouse floors, it was among the first of its kind and the largest Amazon fulfillment center in the U.S.
In the almost year since the site opened, the model has spread across the country with near mirror images of the Boxwood Road warehouse popping up in such places as Clay, New York, Pflugerville, Texas and Suffolk, Virginia. And fairly soon, the Delaware facility could lose its claim to fame as Amazon’s largest center.
The e-commerce giant is behind a 4.1-milllion-square-foot fulfillment center in Ontario, California, according to multiple media reports. Located in the Island Empire region of southern California, one of the country’s hot beds for industrial development, the multi-story warehouse will surpass the 3.8-million-square-foot Boxwood Road warehouse and the rest of Amazon’s recent spate of Boxwood-esque warehouses in total square footage.
The Press Enterprise reported that construction should be completed by the end of the year, citing a spokesperson for logistics developer Prologis. Amazon signed a lease for the building last summer and construction started soon after. The warehouse is being built on an old cattle feedlot.
Dermody Properties built Amazon’s Boxwood Road warehouse where a General Motors plant closed in 2009. The warehouse opened last September and as of earlier this year had hired 3,000 full-time employees. Dermody sold the warehouse to an Australian firm called Macquarie Asset Management Real Estate in February for $392 million, multiple media outlets reported.
In the months before the Newport-area warehouse came online, Amazon opened large warehouses in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee and Colorado Springs, Colorado, setting off a wave of increasingly large warehouse development. The Boxwood Road warehouse just slightly larger than those facilities.
PREVIOUS REPORTING: 5 things to know about Amazon’s new mega-warehouse on Boxwood Road in Delaware
The new Amazon facilities are being built up. They typically have a footprint of around 650,000 square feet and are four or five stories.
The first floor of the Boxwood Road warehouse looks similar to more traditional one- or two-story warehouses. The upper four floors house the robots, which look like oversized Roomba vacuum cleaners. They transport roughly 40,000 robotics pods across the facility (10,000 per floor) along series of “alleys and roads” to stations manned by human employees who either pick products from storage for delivery, place products into storage or count products to maintain an accurate inventory.
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Contact Brandon Holveck at bholveck@delawareonline.com. Follow him on Twitter @holveck_brandon.
