Amazon has opened a new fulfilment centre in Northampton and unveiled plans for a second major facility in nearby Kettering, taking its investment in Northamptonshire beyond £1 billion and creating more than 4,000 jobs.

The announcement marks a significant milestone in the ecommerce group's wider £40 billion UK investment programme for 2025-2027, one year after the company pledged what it described as its largest investment outside the United States. According to Amazon, more than £15 billion of that commitment has already been deployed across the UK.

The new Northampton fulfilment centre, located near junction 15 of the M1, has begun handling customer deliveries and is expected to support more than 2,000 jobs. The £500 million site uses thousands of robots operating across three floors and is designed to store tens of millions of items, which Amazon says makes it one of the country's most advanced logistics operations.

Amazon said the second Northamptonshire project will be a £500 million, 900,000-square-foot facility in Kettering that is scheduled to open this autumn. The site will serve as the UK's largest cross-dock facility, processing around 20 million items each week and creating more than 2,000 permanent positions alongside hundreds of seasonal roles.

John Boumphrey, Amazon UK country manager, said: "A year ago we said we planned to invest £40 billion in the UK. Today you can see what that means; from 4,000 jobs in Northamptonshire and 2,000 in Hull, to drone deliveries from Darlington and a new tech HQ in Swansea. We said we'd deliver and we have. And we're only a year in."

According to the BBC, around 500 employees from Amazon's former Marston Gate site in Bedfordshire were offered transfers to the Northampton operation after the facility closed earlier this year. Recruitment is already under way for engineers, IT specialists, finance staff, HR professionals and operations teams at the forthcoming Kettering site.

Gareth Davies, Amazon regional director, said: "As someone from Northampton, I'm proud to see this county become one of the most important regions in our UK network." He said the new fulfilment centre combined advanced robotics with career development opportunities and would be followed by another major investment in the county.

Amazon also announced the expansion of its Shoreditch headquarters with the opening of a third building, bringing around 6,000 employees together on a single London campus focused on product and technology development.

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