Amazon opened a $1.5 billion air hub in Northern Kentucky, where it plans to process millions of packages a day by the end of the year.
The facility, at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, will serve as the central hub for Amazon’s U.S. air cargo operations, which currently reach 40 locations across the country.
Amazon says more than 2,000 employees will eventually work at the air hub. Its main building is an 800,000-square-foot sortation center that makes heavy use of robotics, including mobile drive units (below) and advanced robotic arms.
The hub is “ideally situated to more closely connect us to customers all across the country,” said Sarah Rhoads, vice president of Amazon Global Air, in a blog post.
Will the hub eventually connect the company to a bigger business opportunity, as well? The scale of the facility is reigniting speculation about the potential for Amazon to offer its own cargo freight service, beyond just fulfilling Amazon orders, competing with UPS, the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx and others.
If that’s the plan, Amazon isn’t tipping its hand.
“Right now, we’re focused on our customers for sure,” Rhoads told CNBC in an interview published Wednesday morning. “We built the hub in Cincinnati to serve our Amazon customers, there’s really no other purpose than that.”
Amazon announced the plans for the new central air hub in 2017, broke ground in 2019, and began operations last week.
The company made its first outright purchase of cargo planes in January, adding eleven owned aircraft to its leased fleet and putting Amazon on track to have more than 85 cargo planes in its network by the end of 2022.
