Amazon opens one of its biggest US facilities in East Valley
Amazon.com’s newest facility in Mesa is one of the largest of its kind in the country.
The Seattle-based company opened a new 1.2 million-square-foot storage and distribution center Friday at 8560 E. Elliot Road, just off the Loop 202 in Mesa. Going by the name KRB9, the facility will be used for storage for third-party sellers.
Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) recently announced that more than 60% of products sold on its online retail platform are from independent sellers and the KRB9 facility will allow those companies to get products into the Amazon system earlier and help keep enough inventory to meet demand.
“We’ve got about 13 million square feet of storage racking – very narrow aisles. It’s wall to wall to wall in this building all the way up to the ceiling,” Rodney Huffman, the KRB9 site lead, told the Business Journal. “This is to make sure that we can get the product to backfill those big advanced robotic buildings and meet the customer demand in one day or less.”
KRB9 is Amazon’s largest storage and distribution center in the country. Huffman said it will keep product and distribute it not only to Amazon’s distribution centers in the Valley, but also to ones in Southern California.
Amazon first started opening storage and distribution centers in 2019, but the company saw a bigger need for them following the Covid-19 pandemic when supply chain issues led to several types of products not being available.
The growth of these types of facilities comes as Amazon’s platform is being utilized by more and more retailers. According to the company’s latest Small Business Empowerment Report there are 10,000 independent sellers using Amazon to sell their products. Last year, independent sellers in Arizona sold more than 44 million products.
Amazon expects the KRB9 facility to employ around 800 people, but that number will balloon up to 1,300 during peak seasons.
“We’ve had no problems filling [positions] at all,” said Tom Orr, a senior operations manager at Amazon. “We’ve got some fantastic workforce so far. They’re happy, motivated, extremely talented. We’ve been lucky with what the East Valley has had to offer us.”
Amazon’s growing presence
The KRB9 facility is the latest in Amazon’s network of sites around the state. In total, Amazon has 17 fulfillment and sortation centers in Arizona and 13 delivery stations. The company employs more than 33,000 full- and part-time employees in the state.
Amazon leases the property KRB9 was built on from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which bought the property for $187 million in the summer of 2022. When the site was first being developed, before Amazon was part of the program, it was supposed to be two buildings, but William Jabjiniak, the director of economic development for the city of Mesa, said plans changed into one large building once Amazon got involved.
Amazon’s KRB9 is the latest addition of big-name tech companies opening in southeast Mesa in what city leaders call the Elliot Road Technology Corridor. Just east of where Amazon’s newest building is located is where Meta is building a data center and where Apple has a data center. On the same street, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has plans to build a data center as well.
“Amazon is going to fit in nicely, but we are not done yet,” Mesa Mayor John Giles told the Business Journal. “We are going to see more buildings of this scale coming out of the ground.”
While Mesa has encouraged more tech and manufacturing operations to come to the city, Giles said Amazon and the city have a good relationship.
“We are seeing Amazon become a significant presence in Mesa,” Giles said. “This is not the first, and there are more on the horizon.”
In 2021, Amazon opened a 140,000-square-foot last mile delivery hub in northeast Mesa. The company has also submitted plans to the city of Mesa to build a multi-floor 2.9 million-square-foot industrial building on nearly 80 acres on the north side of Pecos Road between Sossaman and Ellsworth roads just south of the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. The initial designs of that building are like the configuration of other Amazon fulfillment and distribution centers.