Amazon Plans $250M Austin-Area Fulfillment Center

Amazon fulfillment center. Image courtesy of Amazon

Amazon continues to expand its fulfillment center network with the development of a new location just outside Austin, Texas, in Pflugerville. The e-commerce giant plans to invest $250 million in a facility that will have a minimum footprint of 820,000 square feet.

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Sited roughly 15 miles from downtown Austin, the City of Pflugerville holds the distinction of being the only Central Texas community with both north-south and east-west highway access. Amazon’s new facility will sprout up along Pecan St. off State Highway 130 on a 94-acre site that was recently incorporated into city limits. While the footprint of the project is said to be 820,000 square feet, city documents indicate that the original proposed site plan also includes approximately 3 million square feet of robotic mezzanine space and 40,000 square feet of office space, for a total of roughly 3.8 million square feet in a four-story structure.

Pecan St. site at State Highway 130. Image via Google Satellite View

From the beginning, Pflugerville officials have been highly supportive of Amazon’s fulfillment center—originally dubbed Project Charm to conceal the company’s identity—which will bring 1,000 new full-time jobs to the area. Earlier this week, the City Council approved an Economic Development Performance Agreement between Pflugerville Community Development Corp. and Amazon providing up to $3.8 million for off-site road infrastructure improvements, and for creating capital investment and primary jobs. The project is already underway with Seefried Industrial Properties at the helm as developer.

Here, there and everywhere

News of Amazon’s Pflugerville project comes on the heels of the company’s July 7, 2020 announcement of plans for an 825,000-square-foot facility in Little Rock, Ark., marking its very first fulfillment center in the city. While Amazon is experiencing record demand as a result of the pandemic-induced rise in e-commerce activity, the company had been actively expanding its portfolio of fulfillment centers well before COVID-19 emerged. “We grew the square footage for fulfillment and transportation by 15 percent each of the last two years and we look ahead and see a step-up in that this year as we start to build more capacity for the one-day [delivery],” Brian Olsavsky, CFO of Amazon, said during the company’s fourth quarter 2019 earnings conference call on January 30, 2020.

According to its website, Amazon has approximately 15 fulfillment and sortation centers—and counting—across Texas. Trammell Crow Co. began construction of an 850,000-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center in suburban Houston just weeks ago in June. The company expects to commence operations at the Pflugerville facility in 2021.