SUFFOLK, Va. — More than 1,500 new jobs are coming to Suffolk through Amazon's latest fulfillment center.
While this isn't the first center in Virginia, it is unique in its own way: it's powered largely by robotics.
Thursday morning, state and local leaders welcomed Virginia’s first robotics fulfillment center.
“It’s huge. It’s been a long time coming," said General Manager of the Amazon center Gregory Lum.
The state-of-the-art facility is in a nearly four million squared foot building, and workers are already busy working with thousands of pods and hundreds of robotic drives to quickly pack and ship items
"We’re actually able to take advantage of our robotics technology to scale our operation and actually hire more employees,” Lum said. “What our robotics technology has allowed us to do is take away some of that heavy lifting so that they can focus on safety and quality.”
Right now, leaders say that employees are able to process nearly 200,000 packages per day with the help of the robots.
By next year, they're expected to bump that number up to one million.
The center opened last month, and it already works closely with another large fulfillment center in Chesapeake and delivery hubs in Norfolk, Hampton and Chesapeake.
Governor Glenn Youngkin said Amazon is helping the Hampton Roads economy to bounce back from the pandemic.
“Hampton Roads can be the growth engine for the Commonwealth," Youngkin said during the welcoming ceremony. "Hampton Roads suffered more during the pandemic than the other regions in Virginia, and we’re watching Hampton Roads come back.”