Amazon is deepening its UK investment, putting more than £1bn into two sites in Northamptonshire and adding over 4,000 jobs in one of the largest single-county commitments of its £40bn UK programme.

The company has opened a £500M fulfilment centre in Northampton and confirmed a second £500M facility in nearby Kettering, due to open this autumn. The Northampton site spans three floors of robotics, where thousands of Amazon's ‘Hercules' robots carry shelves of stock to the people picking orders.

Kettering will become the UK's largest cross-dock facility, a 900,000 sq ft hub that sorts and routes around 20 million items a week. It is set to create more than 2,000 permanent jobs, with the Northampton centre accounting for a similar number.

“A year ago we said we planned to invest £40 billion in the UK. Today you can see what that means,” said John Boumphrey, Amazon's UK country manager. “We said we'd deliver and we have. And we're only a year in.”

The investment forms part of a £40bn UK plan running from 2025 to 2027, of which Amazon says it has delivered more than £15bn. The company employs around 75,000 permanent staff across more than 100 UK sites, with frontline pay starting at almost £30,000 a year.

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden welcomed the move, tying it to the government's ‘Get Britain Working' programme and its aim of moving people “from welfare into work”.

The Amazon UK investment lands as the robots scale up

The jobs headline sits against a faster automation push. Amazon now runs more than 1 million robots across its global network. Days before the Northamptonshire announcement, it showed a plain-language version of its Proteus robot, which is due to reach Europe in 2027 and takes spoken instructions rather than code.

Amazon says automation creates work rather than replacing it, and it has pledged to grow its European fulfilment workforce by 25,000. It also cut about 16,000 corporate roles earlier this year, part of a wider tech-sector retrenchment in which capital spending rises while headcount in some functions falls, a pattern TNW has called the ‘AI employment paradox'.

For Northamptonshire, the near-term maths is simple: 4,000 jobs and £1bn of capital. The longer question is what those warehouse roles look like once the next generation of robots can take spoken orders and move stock on their own.

Amazon is hiring and automating at once, and which curve wins out is not yet settled.