Amazon has opened a new fulfilment centre in Northampton and confirmed plans for a second major site in nearby Kettering, taking its investment in Northamptonshire to more than £1 billion and creating in excess of 4,000 jobs in a single county.

The twin developments land exactly a year after the retail and technology giant committed to spend £40 billion in Britain between 2025 and 2027, the largest investment in the company’s history outside the United States. Amazon says more than £15 billion of that pledge has already been delivered.

Customer deliveries have now begun at the £500 million Northampton fulfilment centre, which the company describes as one of the most advanced logistics operations in the country. The site stores tens of millions of items across three floors of robotics, where thousands of Hercules robots retrieve products and bring them directly to the 2,000 employees who will eventually work there, the latest sign of how quickly automation is reshaping Amazon’s warehouse operations.

The Kettering facility, a £500 million, 900,000 sq ft cross-dock operation opening this autumn, will be the largest of its kind in the UK, sorting and routing around 20 million customer items every week. It will create more than 2,000 permanent jobs alongside hundreds of seasonal roles, with recruitment already under way for engineers, HR and IT professionals, finance specialists and operations teams.

Pay for frontline roles starts at almost £30,000 a year, with private medical insurance, subsidised meals, an employee discount and funded career development from day one.

John Boumphrey, Amazon’s UK country manager, said the announcements showed the company was making good on its word. “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.”

Gareth Davies, Amazon regional director and a Northampton native, added: “I am proud to see this county become one of the most important regions in our UK network. With another £500 million facility on the horizon, this is an incredibly exciting time for our teams and the wider community.”

Shakespeare meets Shoreditch

The company has also expanded its London campus in Shoreditch, Hackney, opening a third building that brings around 6,000 employees together at its UK headquarters. The new office sits close to the site of Shakespeare’s Curtain Theatre, and after archaeologists uncovered artefacts from the playhouse during construction, that heritage was woven into the 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.

“At its heart, this investment is about our customers, delivering faster, offering greater choice, and making life more convenient,” Boumphrey said. “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.”

The Northamptonshire milestones cap a busy twelve months for Amazon in the UK. Since June 2025 the company has opened a fulfilment centre in Hull creating 2,000 jobs, announced a 1,400-job distribution centre in Peterborough, opened a global headquarters in Swansea for its Veeqo shipping software business, and begun rolling out more than 160 electric heavy goods vehicles, the largest electric truck fleet anywhere in Amazon’s global operations.

In Darlington, the company has started delivering parcels to customers by drone through its Prime Air service, as the Civil Aviation Authority works to make beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone flights routine in UK airspace. Amazon says it has delivered more than 1.6 billion items same day or next day over the past year, its fastest UK speeds ever, and has launched Amazon Now, an ultra-fast grocery service piloting in London with Manchester and Birmingham to follow.

The company is also continuing to invest in UK data centre infrastructure as part of an £8 billion commitment to cloud and AI capacity running to 2028, and has begun construction of a £40 million delivery station in Stockton-on-Tees, its first UK building to pursue zero carbon certification.

Amazon now employs around 75,000 permanent staff across more than 100 UK sites. Almost half of its entry-level hires were previously unemployed or came straight from education, starting on a minimum of £29,744 a year – £31,824 in some locations – with private medical insurance from day one and no zero-hours contracts. Minimum starting pay has risen by up to 5.9 per cent over the past year and by 43 per cent since 2022.

Through its Career Choice programme, the company funds 100 per cent of tuition up to £3,000 a year for employees studying nationally recognised qualifications, whether or not they lead to a career at Amazon, and has pledged to double UK participation by 2030 as part of a $1 billion global investment in the scheme.

Amazon is also the UK’s largest private sector provider of supported internships for young people aged 18 to 24 with learning disabilities and autism. More than 80 per cent of participants move into permanent employment after graduation, a striking figure when employment rates among adults with a learning disability remain stubbornly low across the UK. The company plans to quadruple the programme by 2030, supporting more than a thousand young people into work.