Amazon Adds Multistory Mega-Warehouse in Inland Empire
The e-commerce giant signs a 4.1M SF lease in Ontario, CA for a new five-story robotics facility.
Amazon will be adding the latest of its multistory, robotics mega-warehouses on a 4.1M SF site in Ontario, CA that is across the street from Watson Industrial Park, where Amazon already has one of its smaller distribution centers.
According to reports, the new five-story facility is expected to be the anchor tenant of a 370-acre project under development by Prologis that will include up to 7M SF of industrial space and a new 1.4M SF business park.
The development is one of the last available sites of that size in the Inland Empire, which, along with New York and New Jersey, is a market with industrial warehouses filled to capacity. Prologis developed the first multistory logistics facility, known as Georgetown Crossroads, in Seattle in 2018.
The new Amazon facility in the Inland Empire will be the latest in a series of mammoth multistory warehouses the e-commerce giant has been building across the country since 2019, including a 3.8M SF, five-story warehouse nearing completion in Clay, NY.
The $350M warehouse in Clay is an Amazon Robotics facility that handles small, sortable merchandise. Everything that goes in and out of the warehouse is no bigger than 18 inches, sized to fit a mechanized conveyor system and mobile shelving units.
Last year, Amazon opened a 3.6M SF warehouse in Mt. Juliet, TN near Nashville, and a 3.5M SF warehouse in Colorado Springs near the regional airport, both of which are multistory robotics facilities. A 3.8M SF Amazon multistory robotics facility is opening this year in Detroit.
Another Amazon robotics facility is under construction in Shreveport, LA. Amazon has announced plans to build up to 11 of the multistory robotics warehouses.
The robotics mega-warehouses employ roughly the same number of workers—about a thousand—that handle order-picking in Amazon’s much smaller distribution centers.
With existing industrial warehouse space filled to capacity and rent hikes on triple-net leases expected to exceed 60 percent this year in the Inland Empire, new warehouse development is expanding in the eastern half of the region, which spans Riverside and San Bernardino counties from the Los Angeles city limits to the Arizona border.
The expansion of warehouse projects in the eastern half of the Inland Empire has generated pushback from residents in communities who don’t want the heavy truck traffic from warehouses in their neighborhoods.
Industrial warehouse rents that averaged $6.75/square foot at the beginning of the year have doubled in the Inland Empire.