Amazon Opens One of its Biggest US Facilities in East Valley

Tom Orr, part of the leadership team at Amazon’s new KRB9 facility in Mesa, looks at the empty shelves of the new 1.2 million-square-foot storage and distribution center. Soon the site’s shelves will be filled with product from third-party-sellers.

Amazon.com’s newest facility in Mesa is one of the largest of its kind in the country.

The Seattle-based company opened a new 1.2 million-square-foot storage and distribution center Friday at 8560 E. Elliot Road, just off the Loop 202 in Mesa. Going by the name KRB9, the facility will be used for storage for third-party sellers.

Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) recently announced that more than 60% of products sold on its online retail platform are from independent sellers and the KRB9 facility will allow those companies to get products into the Amazon system earlier and help keep enough inventory to meet demand.

“We’ve got about 13 million square feet of storage racking – very narrow aisles. It’s wall to wall to wall in this building all the way up to the ceiling,” Rodney Huffman, the KRB9 site lead, told the Business Journal. “This is to make sure that we can get the product to backfill those big advanced robotic buildings and meet the customer demand in one day or less.”

KRB9 is Amazon’s largest storage and distribution center in the country. Huffman said it will keep product and distribute it not only to Amazon’s distribution centers in the Valley, but also to ones in Southern California.