• 10 Amazon Hub Locker+ locations • 1 Amazon 4-Star store • 1 Amazon Books store • 5 Prime Now hubs • 1 Wind farm • 7 On-site solar locations • Amazon Original series filmed in Texas: “Panic”
Colorado River Constructors opened the new U.S. Highway 183 South, formerly Bergstrom Expressway, one of Austin’s most important arterial roadways. Photo courtesy of the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority
of external community partnerships with policy makers and economic development organizations we work with on a daily basis. They also can help guide where we can best integrate ourselves into the neighborhoods.” Map of Fulfillment From January 2018 through March 2021, Site Selection magazine’s proprietary database of corporate facility investment projects tracked more than 2,440 individual projects across all industry sectors and facility types in Texas. More than 30% of them — 805, to be precise — were distribution facilities. And a whole extended family of them were nice big packages of jobs delivered by Amazon to its new neighborhoods. Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 70,000 jobs in Texas and invested more than $16.9 billion across the state, including infrastructure and compensation to its 64
TEXAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE
employees. The only states with more investment are California and Amazon’s home state of Washington. Amazon says its investments have contributed more than $18.8 billion in GDP to the Texas economy and have helped create over 49,000 indirect jobs on top of Amazon’s direct hires — from jobs in construction and logistics to professional services. Moreover, more than 116,000 independent authors and small and medium businesses in Texas are selling to customers in Amazon’s store, creating thousands of additional jobs across the state. Amazon’s main investments in Texas include the following: • 17 Fulfillment and sortation centers • 10 Delivery stations • 3 Tech hubs • 3 Air Gateways • 1 Regional Air Hub • 35 Whole Foods Market locations
It’s no wonder that during a Site Selection webinar in March 2021 about the top metro areas in the nation, Texas-based Susan Arledge, executive managing director of site selection and incentives at esrp, referred to the e-commerce facility surge inside and outside of Texas as “the United States of Amazon.” But they’re not the only ones accessing Texas highways, ports, airports and customers. In Lancaster in recent months, Walmart has located two facilities totaling 2.2 million sq. ft. and 1,300 jobs; DSV Logistics is constructing a 1-millionsq.-ft. regional headquarters with 250 office jobs; and Kodiak Robotics is pioneering driverless semi trucks at their main Texas hub. Shane Shepard, economic development director for the City of Lancaster, says the community has “a ton of creeks and rolling hills for housing, schools that are rated the same as our counterparts in north Dallas such as McKinney, Richardson, and Plano, an old downtown set for redevelopment and programming, and enough space for another 54 million square feet of industrial. He also notes the area has strong infrastructure for data centers. Good thing. The e-commerce wave, after all, depends as much on the old
