Amazon on Thursday opened a new warehouse in Mexico City, Mexico, which it says is the company’s largest last-mile delivery centre in Latin America.

The warehouse, which specialises in last-mile deliveries to customers, measures 30,000 square metres and will serve the city of more than 8.8 million people. The surrounding area contains around 22 million people, making Mexico City one of the biggest urban centres in Latin America

Amazon has not revealed how much it invested in the warehouse, nor how many people it would employ.

Since launching in the country in 2015, Amazon has invested more than $3 billion in an effort to grow in Latin America’s second-biggest economy and take on the likes of Walmart and Mercado Libre. The company operates around 40 warehouses in Mexico and employs more than 40,000 people – 8,000 directly and 32,000 indirectly.

At an opening event, Amazon Mexico logistics boss Diana Frances said that the warehouse would serve the company’s ambition to operate distribution centres closer to customers in the country.

Also at the event was US Ambassador Ken Salazar, who praised Amazon for creating jobs, particularly in Mexico’s poorer southern regions. He said: "There's no corner forgotten for Amazon ... It's wherever you look in Mexico.”

While the warehouse will serve the relatively affluent Mexico City, Amazon has been criticised for its last major hub opening in the country.

In mid-2021, the company opened a $21 million 'state-of-the-art warehouse' in Tijuana, a largely impoverished area near the US border. The warehouse was built next to a housing settlement, with the huge facility dwarfing domiciles made out of cardboard and wood scraps.

In the years since, the facility has been criticised for failing to deliver the promised uplift to the local community with a report from Rest of World highlighting low rates of pay – an alleged $2.60 per hour for workers at the Nueva Esperanza distribution centre – and broken pledges to hire significant numbers of people from the slum.

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