Amazon plans to build a distribution center on almost 60 acres of undeveloped land that it bought this month in the Tri-Valley city of Pleasanton, a company spokesperson said on Thursday.
The e-commerce juggernaut paid $75 million to buy the 58.5-acre parcel at 3000 Busch Road, spokesperson Natalie Wolfrom said, confirming details on the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder’s Office’s website and the Mercury News, which reported the sale earlier. The purchase is an expansion of Amazon’s operations in the Bay Area to expand capacity in 2024 and 2025, Wolfrom said.
The company plans to build a distribution center on the site that will either be a last-mile delivery station or a middle-mile sorting center, Wolfrom said. Last-mile stations are the final stop between Amazon fulfillment or sorting facilities and the vans and delivery trucks that deliver packages to customers. Middle-mile operations centers organize packages by ZIP code and pass them along to the U.S. Postal Service or Amazon’s own delivery network.
Amazon plans to build either a 520,000-square-foot sorting center for about 800 employees or a 201,000-square-foot delivery station for 100 to 200 workers, Wolfrom said. It hasn’t yet decided between them, she said.
While the company hasn’t completed its timeline for the project and would need to obtain city approval before it can break ground, Wolfrom said it expects to start construction in 2023. It hasn’t filed a formal development application for the site, according to Ellen Clark, director of Pleasanton’s community development department.
The Pleasanton building would add to Amazon’s facilities in neighboring Livermore and Dublin, which together make up most of the East Bay’s Tri-Valley subregion. Amazon leases a 611,000-square-foot warehouse in Livermore, reportedly one of the largest single warehouse buildings in the Bay Area, that it uses as a delivery station, and also owns a 201,620-square-foot facility in Dublin that it bought last year for almost $50 million.
Amazon bought the land in Pleasanton from a limited partnership named USL Pleasanton Lakes LP, whose business address matches that of Lionstone Investments, a Houston-based real estate investment firm. A Lionstone representative declined to comment.
The parcel has been eyed for development before. In 2017, developer SteelWave submitted conditional use permit and design review applications to build an almost 1.5-million-square-foot industrial complex on the site. The company later cut its size to 1.29 million square feet before formally withdrawing its proposal in December 2018, Pleasanton’s Clark said on Wednesday.
It’s unclear what prompted SteelWave to shelve its plans. Steve Dunn, the company’s senior managing director, declined to comment.