How many Amazon fulfillment and delivery facilities were closed, canceled, or delayed nationwide between 2022 and 2025?
Executive summary
Public reporting documents a wave of Amazon adjustments to its U.S. fulfillment footprint beginning in 2022; independent trackers and trade outlets reported anywhere from roughly four dozen closures/cancellations/delays up to a consolidated count of 99 facilities by early 2023, with the largest single tally—99—coming from supply‑chain tracker MWPVL International and cited by multiple outlets [1] [2]. Amazon explicitly disputed some of those tracking counts, and the sources provided do not supply a verified, up-to-date nationwide total through the end of 2025, so any definitive number beyond the published snapshots would be speculative [1].
1. The messy arithmetic: multiple snapshots, multiple totals
Across mid‑to‑late 2022, industry trackers and press outlets published differing snapshots: local reporting and aggregated maps documented counts such as 44 facilities closed or canceled with 25 delayed (reported as a combined figure in CNBC), as well as other tallies that rounded to about 66 or 71 affected sites depending on the week and the analyst’s cut of closures versus delays [3] [4] [5]. Those divergent mid‑2022 figures reflect different methodologies—some reporters counted only facilities already shuttered, others added planned sites pushed back or abandoned—and help explain why contemporaneous tallies ranged widely [4] [3] [5].
2. The “99” headline and its provenance
By late February and early March 2023, Marc Wulfraat of MWPVL International provided a larger consolidated count—99 U.S. facilities that MWPVL characterized as canceled, closed or delayed—an estimate that was reported by Retail Dive and Supply Chain Dive and framed as the most comprehensive tracking snapshot available at that moment [1] [2]. Those articles also reported MWPVL’s estimate of roughly 32.3 million square feet affected across 30 states, numbers derived from the firm’s ongoing logistics footprint monitoring [1].
3. Company pushback and incentives to dispute
Amazon disputed the MWPVL findings in several reports, and company statements issued to the press emphasized that evaluating a complex, evolving network is nuanced and that it continued to open new facilities even while adjusting others [6] [1]. That pushback matters because MWPVL is an independent consultant whose role—tracking openings, delays and cancellations—can highlight excess capacity but can also overstate disruption when Amazon is actively reshuffling leases, delaying ramps, or consolidating projects rather than permanently exiting markets [6] [7].
4. Why counts changed and why agreement is hard
The large swings in reported totals reflect clear operational choices described in the sources: Amazon deliberately paused or delayed openings to avoid adding payroll costs, paid leases while deferring ramps, and closed or repurposed smaller delivery stations more often than giant fulfillment centers—moves that produce ambiguous categories for “closed,” “canceled,” or “delayed” and invite disparate counting methods across outlets and trackers [8] [6] [4]. Industry pieces also noted that despite these pullbacks, Amazon continued building dozens of new facilities, complicating net‑change calculations [7].
5. The limits of the record through 2025
While some 2025 stories and logistics blogs discuss ongoing capacity and individual closures or delays, the provided reporting does not include an updated, independently verified nationwide tally that runs through 2025; the last consolidated tracker figure in these sources is MWPVL’s 99 count reported in early 2023, and subsequent items cite local or single‑facility events without aggregating them to a national total [1] [9] [10]. Therefore, the best-supported conclusion from the available reporting is that Amazon’s pullback affected dozens of sites in 2022 (estimates varied, often reported as 44–71) and that MWPVL reported a cumulative 99 canceled/closed/delayed U.S. facilities by early 2023, but there is no corroborated total in the supplied sources that definitively covers 2022–2025 as a single figure [3] [5] [1].