Walmart scales high-tech fulfillment with $1.3 billion project
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Walmart is preparing another large investment in automated fulfillment, with plans for a $1.3 billion facility in Carnesville, Georgia, that will add 1.5 million square feet to the retailer’s logistics network while strengthening its ability to serve ecommerce demand across the region.
Construction at the Franklin 85 Logistics Center is expected to begin in late 2026, with the project projected to create 1,000 jobs and become part of a growing group of highly automated Walmart facilities designed to support faster order processing and broader same-day and next-day delivery coverage.
Although the building is significant for its physical scale, its value to Walmart will depend less on square footage alone than on how productively the company can use that space to store inventory, process orders and move merchandise through the network.
Walmart has spent several years developing fulfillment operations around high-density storage, robotics, software and redesigned workflows, with the company saying its next-generation fulfillment centers can hold twice the inventory of traditional facilities while fulfilling twice as many customer orders each day.
That shift changes the role of the fulfillment center because warehouses are no longer competing only on capacity, location and labor availability, with automation adding another measure of performance based on how much merchandise can move through the same physical footprint and how quickly each order can progress from storage to shipment.
Walmart’s Georgia investment is about more than warehouse space
Carnesville gives Walmart another large fulfillment node in a state where the retailer already has a substantial physical and logistics presence, allowing the company to add automated capacity within a market that already supports a broad network of stores, supply chain facilities, employees and suppliers.
According to the Georgia governor’s office, Walmart operates 209 Walmart stores and Sam’s Clubs and 11 supply chain facilities across the state, employs more than 65,300 associates in Georgia, and spent more than $26.2 billion with suppliers in the state during fiscal 2025.
The new site fits a broader strategy of placing automated fulfillment capacity in locations that can support faster delivery while complementing the role of stores and other logistics facilities within the network.
Delivery speed makes geography more important rather than less, because even a highly automated warehouse can only compress part of the fulfillment cycle if the inventory required for an order is located too far from the customer.
Walmart’s physical network gives the retailer another operational lever because stores can function as shopping destinations, pickup points, fulfillment sites and delivery stations, while larger fulfillment centers carry wider product assortments and feed parcels into the ecommerce network.
The result is a distribution model in which delivery performance depends on several connected decisions, including where inventory is stored, how quickly products are picked and packed, how efficiently orders are routed and how close the selected fulfillment point is to the final customer.
Walmart has previously outlined how it expects that model to improve delivery coverage, saying when it announced its first group of next-generation fulfillment centers in 2022 that four such facilities could provide 75% of the US population with next-day or two-day shipping on millions of items, while the combination of those sites and traditional fulfillment centers could raise that reach to 95%.
Carnesville extends that network logic by adding another large automated facility intended to increase fulfillment capacity while placing inventory closer to customers who increasingly expect shorter delivery windows.
Automation is changing the economics of Walmart’s fulfillment network
The economics of a 1.5 million-square-foot building change significantly when automation can increase both the amount of inventory stored inside the facility and the number of orders processed through it, making throughput a central measure of warehouse productivity rather than treating floor space as the primary indicator of capacity.
Walmart’s automated fulfillment model uses high-density storage and retrieval technology to reduce manual movement through the building, with its original next-generation design reducing what the company described as a 12-step manual process to five steps by bringing merchandise to employees instead of requiring workers to travel long distances to retrieve individual products.
This approach has the potential to raise productivity by combining denser storage with faster movement, more consistent order processing and less time spent on repetitive physical handling.
At two automated supply chain facilities announced for Lancaster, Texas, Walmart said the combination of employees and automation would allow the sites to move more than twice the volume of traditional fulfillment and grocery distribution centers while improving accuracy and processing speed.
Walmart has reported similar results elsewhere in its supply chain, saying its high-tech grocery distribution centers can store twice as many cases and process more than twice the volume of traditional perishable facilities.
Those figures should not be treated as specific performance forecasts for Carnesville, but they provide useful context for understanding the operating model Walmart has been developing and the level of productivity the company expects automation to support across different parts of its logistics network.
The strategy extends beyond newly constructed buildings because Walmart has also been retrofitting existing regional distribution centers with automated technology designed to increase inventory accuracy and building capacity while reducing some of the manual handling associated with conventional warehouse operations.
For an operation of Walmart’s scale, even relatively small reductions in the cost of moving each unit can become financially meaningful when multiplied across millions of products and orders.
In 2023, the retailer said it expected roughly 55% of fulfillment center volume to move through automated facilities by the end of fiscal 2026, while also projecting that average unit costs could improve by about 20% as its supply chain changes were implemented.
The Carnesville project therefore fits within a longer-term operating strategy in which capital spending on automation is intended to improve the productivity of fulfillment infrastructure rather than simply add more warehouse space.
One thousand new jobs show how warehouse work is changing
A highly automated fulfillment center that is also expected to create 1,000 jobs complicates the common assumption that warehouse automation and employment necessarily move in opposite directions, particularly as larger logistics operations increasingly require workers who can manage, monitor and maintain sophisticated systems.
Automation can reduce certain forms of manual work, especially repetitive movement and product handling, while changing the mix of jobs available inside the facility and increasing demand for employees with technical, analytical and maintenance skills.
When Walmart announced its automated operations in Lancaster, the retailer said 40% of the approximately 1,000 jobs created across the two facilities would require STEM skills for technical roles, providing one example of how automation can alter the composition of a logistics workforce without removing the need for labor altogether.
Walmart’s earlier next-generation fulfillment centers introduced positions including control technicians, quality audit analysts and flow managers, while automated regional distribution centers have created roles such as cell operators and maintenance technicians.
The company has not published a comparable occupational breakdown for Carnesville, so the workforce profile of the Georgia site should not be assumed to match earlier automated projects exactly.
The broader pattern still shows why employment numbers alone provide an incomplete picture of automation’s effect on logistics labor, because the number of workers matters alongside the nature of the tasks they perform, the technology they operate and the technical capabilities employers increasingly expect them to develop.
Walmart’s 2026 workforce report describes a similar direction, with operational roles working alongside new technology and employees developing new skills as AI and automation change how some tasks are carried out across the business.
For logistics executives, Carnesville offers another indication that the competitive unit in ecommerce fulfillment is no longer simply the warehouse itself, but the combined performance of location, inventory density, throughput, software, automation and labor.
A 1.5 million-square-foot building still represents a major real estate commitment, yet Walmart’s $1.3 billion investment suggests that the more consequential measure will be how much inventory the facility can hold, how quickly it can process orders and how efficiently people and automated systems can turn that physical space into faster fulfillment.
Source:
DC Velocity
