Work continues on Amazon fulfillment center in Loveland

Construction continues on a 3.5 million-squarefoot Amazon fulfillment center — a four-story building large enough to hold 63 football fields — that is expected to open with 1,000 employees.

But Amazon officials aren’t ready to say exactly when the facility located off County Road 30 just west of Interstate 25 in Loveland will begin filling online orders.

“We have not established a rough opening date at this time,” Sam Bailey, economic development policy manager for the Mountain West region, said during a Friday tour of the facility. He did confirm that it will not be this year.

DEN9, as the Loveland facility is known among Amazon officials, has been in the works since late 2021 with the first physical work being to grade the land to prepare it for construction, followed by outside site work and construction of the facility.

That is continuing with some final pieces, including the extension of Byrd Drive through the site, yet to be complete before the developer Trammel Crow and contractor Ryan Companies hand the site over to Amazon for work to begin on outfitting and finishing the interior of the building.

Bailey said that handoff could happen sometime this summer.

The massive building sits on 152 acres in northeast Loveland — a place that, once open, Bailey said is expected to employ 1,000 people to start. Bailey could not offer an estimate of what that workforce could grow to with time, but he did say that the Thornton facility that opened in 2017 is now at 3,000 employees.

Bailey said the average wage at Amazon is $20.50 per hour with full benefits at day one; he expects much of the workforce to be drawn from Larimer, Weld, Broomfield and Boulder counties.

In fact, one of the reasons Amazon selected the Loveland site was “its connectivity to a talented workforce,” as well as its connection to Interstate 25, Bailey said.

Shipping trucks will exit I-25 at Crossroads Boulevard to access the Loveland facility, he explained.