Caribou will soon house a new Amazon warehouse in an effort to accelerate delivery times throughout northern Maine, part of a new initiative that the world’s largest online retailer announced this spring to improve shipping speeds in rural areas.

“We’re close to completing construction work on a small delivery station that will support faster delivery and better service to customers in Caribou and across northeastern Maine,” Amazon spokesperson Amber Plunkett said in a written statement Thursday morning. “We’ll share more once operations have started.”

The pending opening of the warehouse was first reported by the Bangor Daily News.

The Caribou warehouse, located at 33 Aldrich Drive, will be the first Amazon warehouse in Maine.

“The city of Caribou is very excited to have this warehouse in our community, and it shows that investors recognize the attributes that Caribou has that make this a very attractive place to locate your business,” Caribou City Manager Penny Thompson said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon.

“We are pleased that other companies … are recognizing that Caribou’s central location, business-friendly environment and available project sites, owned by local developers with strong ties to Caribou, make it a straightforward process to locate here,” Thompson added.

Amazon packages across the state are currently stored and delivered by third parties, such as the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx and UPS. The closest current Amazon warehouse to Maine is located in Nashua, New Hampshire, according to Amazon Seller Central.

Amazon’s $4 billion initiative to boost rural delivery, unveiled in April, says the company’s push to build over 200 delivery stations in rural areas will create more than 100,000 new jobs.

The Caribou warehouse is expected create new jobs in the area, but it remains unclear how many.

“We have an eager and educated workforce, and this employer will provide good-paying jobs and benefits as an employer in the community,” Thompson said.

No other planned warehouses in Maine have been announced, and no others are listed on any directories of Amazon locations.

In 2022, the Jeff Bezos-founded, Seattle-based megaretailer considered opening a warehouse in Scarborough, with town officials confirming a meeting with Amazon representatives but saying that no official proposal had been filed. Residents and officials said at the time that the company had been scouting potential locations off Running Hill Road, near the Maine Mall and the Maine Turnpike.

A few years prior, Scarborough was also one of the hundreds of U.S. towns and cities that expressed interest in becoming home to Amazon’s second headquarters. Town officials said in 2017 that they planned to propose the Scarborough Downs development as the “longest of long shots” to host Amazon HQ2, which was eventually split between locations in the New York City and Washington, D.C., areas.