Amazon is quietly turning Louisiana into one of its Southern strongholds. What started as a modest logistics footprint has turned into a full-on buildout, with fulfillment hubs, sortation sites and last-mile centers reshaping job markets and industrial real estate across multiple parishes. From Carencro and Baton Rouge to Shreveport and the New Orleans suburbs, local officials are now juggling staffing, traffic planning and retail follow-on as part of a new logistics reality. The expansion has become a major line item in regional economic plans as communities weigh the upside of new jobs against the tradeoffs of hosting massive distribution facilities.
According to NOLA.com, Amazon now runs 13 locations across Louisiana and employs more than 10,000 people in the state, a sharp climb from a much smaller presence just a few years back. That statewide total, assembled from public filings and local economic partners, covers everything from large robotics-powered fulfillment centers to leaner sortation and delivery stations. Economic development officials said that they see the network as a new spine for local logistics jobs and industrial demand.
Baton Rouge: Cortana Mall Turned Logistics Campus
In East Baton Rouge, the once-fading Cortana Mall has been reborn as a 3.4-million-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center that local officials now describe as the anchor of the company’s Louisiana network. Built at roughly a $200 million scale, the site is geared to move tens of thousands of packages a day, about 90,000 on a typical day with spikes to several hundred thousand during peak periods, according to the Greater Baton Rouge Economic Partnership. Leaders say the operation has already altered traffic and land use patterns along the Florida Boulevard corridor and helped spur new investment in nearby retail and services, a trend documented in regional reporting and analysis.
Shreveport: Robotics-Heavy Mega-Center
In northwest Louisiana, the SHV1 fulfillment center outside Shreveport covers roughly 2.5 million square feet across multiple levels and opened as a robotics-heavy operation in 2024. Local coverage reports the facility can move hundreds of thousands of items a day and approach 1 million at peak, and it has hired more than a thousand local workers as it ramps toward full capacity. Those operational numbers and the center’s scale were detailed in coverage of the site’s launch and early days by KSLA.
Same-Day And Last-Mile Hubs Pop Up Statewide
Amazon’s Louisiana push is not just about mega-warehouses. In Jefferson Parish, the Elmwood same-day delivery site is a roughly 150,000-square-foot facility that keeps tens of thousands of items on hand for rapid local delivery. In Carencro, the company rolled out a one-million-square-foot fulfillment center tied to a $100 million investment, first announced in a company release and followed by a string of additional delivery-station footprints and last-mile nodes around the state in recent years. The Carencro project was outlined in the company’s own Amazon Newsroom, while the Elmwood operation was spotlighted as the retailer’s first same-day delivery facility in Louisiana in regional coverage.
Local Ripple Effects And New Businesses
Economic partners say the Baton Rouge fulfillment campus, in particular, has kicked off a wave of nearby activity. Studies and reporting estimate roughly $68–70 million in added revenue for businesses within a two-mile radius and about $1.3–1.5 million in extra sales tax collections in 2024. That local lift, measured by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber and examined in regional coverage, goes a long way toward explaining why municipal leaders moved quickly on zoning changes and infrastructure upgrades around the site. Forbes and regional partners have documented those early spillover effects.
Commercial Real Estate And The Build-For-One Problem
On the real estate side, commercial brokers warn that many of the new structures are so customized for Amazon’s automation and conveyor systems that they may be tough to repurpose if the company ever walks away. One local broker told reporters the Cortana campus is built for them and “If Amazon ever leaves, I have no idea who goes in,” a line captured in regional coverage that neatly sums up the long-term challenge of finding second acts for monster logistics buildings, as reported by NOLA.com…