Amazon today opened a new fulfilment centre in Northampton and announced plans for a second major site in nearby Kettering, taking its investment in a single county to more than £1 billion and creating more than 4,000 jobs.
The developments come one year after Amazon committed to invest £40 billion in the UK from 2025 to 2027 – the largest investment in the company’s history outside the US – with more than £15 billion already delivered. Amazon’s Northampton fulfilment centre is one of the most advanced logistics operations in the country, with thousands of robots working alongside employees on three floors. The Kettering site will be the UK’s largest cross-dock facility, sorting and routing customer items across the country.
Amazon has also expanded its London headquarters in Shoreditch with the opening of a third building, bringing around 6,000 employees together on a single campus.
The milestones are part of a year of significant investment by Amazon across the UK. Since June 2025, the company has launched a new fulfilment centre in Hull, announced a new distribution centre in Peterborough, opened a new global headquarters in Swansea for Amazon-owned tech company Veeqo, started drone deliveries in Darlington, and begun deployment of the UK’s largest fleet of electric trucks.
Investing £1 billion in Northamptonshire
Today, Amazon confirms it will open a £500 million major operational facility in Kettering this autumn. The 900,000-square-foot site will process around 20 million items each week, creating more than 2,000 permanent jobs and hundreds of seasonal roles. Recruitment is under way for engineers, HR and IT professionals, finance specialists, and operations teams. Pay for frontline roles starts at almost £30,000 per year, with private medical insurance, subsidised meals, an employee discount and funded career development from day one.
The announcement comes as customer deliveries begin at Amazon’s new £500 million fulfilment centre in Northampton, where a further 2,000 jobs will be created. One of the most advanced logistics operations in the UK, the Northampton site now stores tens of millions of items across three floors of robotics, where thousands of Hercules robots retrieve products and bring them directly to employees.
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, a new tech HQ in Swansea. We said we’d deliver and we have. And we’re only a year in.”
Gareth Davies, Amazon regional director, said: “As someone from Northampton, I am proud to see this county become one of the most important regions in our UK network. Our new fulfilment centre is up and running with cutting-edge robotics, a modern working environment, and genuine career development opportunities. With another £500 million facility on the horizon, this is an incredibly exciting time for our teams and the wider community.”
Expanded London campus
Amazon has expanded its London campus in Shoreditch, Hackney, with the opening of a third building near the site of Shakespeare’s Curtain Theatre. During construction of the building, archaeologists uncovered artefacts from the theatre’s history, and that heritage has been woven into the office’s design – from patterned glazing featuring flora and fauna drawn from Shakespeare’s plays, to bird-shaped light fittings inspired by a whistle found during the dig.
John Boumphrey continued: “At its heart, this investment is about our customers – delivering faster, offering greater choice, and making life more convenient. But it is also about creating high-quality jobs and building stronger communities across the country, not only in London and the South East but throughout England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.”
Investing in people
Amazon employs around 75,000 permanent people across more than 100 UK sites. Almost half of its entry-level hires were previously unemployed or came directly from education – starting on a minimum of £29,744 per year, and, in some locations, £31,824, with private medical insurance from day one and no zero-hours contracts. Over the past year, minimum starting pay has risen by up to 5.9% and has increased by 43% since 2022.
Through its Career Choice programme, Amazon funds 100% of tuition up to £3,000 per year for employees to train in nationally recognised qualifications, whether or not they lead to a career at Amazon. At Delivering the Future earlier this month, Amazon announced a $1 billion global investment in Career Choice – part of its US$2.5 billion Future Ready 2030 commitment – reshaping the programme to focus on the careers where growth is strongest: technology, logistics, and mechanical and industrial systems. This includes doubling UK participation in Career Choice by 2030.
Amazon is also the UK’s largest private sector provider of supported internships for young people aged 16 to 24 with learning disabilities and autism. More than 80% of participants move into permanent employment after graduation, compared to a national employment rate of just 6% for adults with learning disabilities. Amazon has announced plans to quadruple the programme by 2030 – supporting more than a thousand young people with learning disabilities and autism into employment.
A year of delivery
In the past 12 months, Amazon has delivered on its commitment across speed, infrastructure and people, which includes the following updates:
Speed and convenience
- Delivered more than 1.6 billion items same day or next day to UK customers – the fastest speeds ever.
- Recent investments in fulfilment infrastructure have enabled the launch of Amazon Now, an ultra-fast delivery service offering thousands of groceries and household essentials in around 30 minutes or less, piloting in London with plans to expand to Manchester and Birmingham later this year.
- Started drone deliveries to customers from Amazon’s Darlington fulfilment centre with Prime Air.
- Customers in parts of London can now order fresh groceries with their Same-Day Delivery orders – a direct result of expanded local fulfilment capacity – alongside everything else they shop for on Amazon.
Infrastructure and jobs
- Opened new fulfilment centres in Hull (2,000 jobs) and Northampton (2,000 jobs), with two further sites launching this autumn: the UK’s largest cross-dock facility in Kettering (2,000 jobs) and a new distribution centre in Peterborough (1,400 jobs) that will replenish fulfilment centres across the UK.
- Continued investment in UK data centre infrastructure as part of an £8 billion commitment between 2024 and 2028 – supporting the UK’s ambition to increase AI compute capacity.
- Expanded London campus in Shoreditch, bringing together around 6,000 employees across three buildings.
- Opened a new global tech headquarters in Swansea for Amazon-owned Veeqo, with more than 200 employees and more than £150 million committed to the site through to 2032.
- Continued to film multiple TV series and films across the UK at our studio space in Bray and Shepperton as well as across Scotland, Cardiff, Bristol, and other locations. Invested further in our Prime Video Pathway skills and training programme, supporting many more trainees and apprentices across the TV industry both at entry and mid-level.
- Started rollout of more than 160 electric heavy goods vehicles on UK roads – the largest number of electric trucks in Amazon’s global fleet.
- Began construction on a new delivery station in Stockton-on-Tees – Amazon’s first building in the UK to pursue zero carbon certification – featuring cement-free paving, AI-powered carbon tracking, and mass timber construction. The £40 million site opens this autumn, creating around 100 jobs.
Skills and community
- Across Amazon’s UK employability programmes over the past two years, more than 85% of participants progress into employment or education, generating £4 in social value for every £1 invested.
- As principal partner of The Multibank, Amazon has helped redistribute more than 16 million products through more than 2 million orders to families in need in the last four years.
