Amazon: its European home in Luxembourg

©LMIH/Focalize

Amazon, founded in Seattle in 1994, has run its European business from Luxembourg for more than two decades, today from a Kirchberg campus on Avenue John F. Kennedy.

From Seattle to the Grund

Amazon began in 1994 as an online bookshop launched by Jeff Bezos in Seattle, the city that still holds the group’s global headquarters and most of its research and engineering. Europe came nine years later. Amazon established its European headquarters in Luxembourg in 2003, in the Grund and Clausen districts, at the foot of the city’s fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The company has since pointed to Luxembourg’s stable regulatory environment, multilingual workforce and central position as an ideal base for coordinating operations across the continent. From those early offices below the cliffs, Amazon built the centre from which it now oversees pan-European logistics together with regional roles in finance, legal, human resources, technology and corporate strategy.

A Kirchberg campus

Success soon outgrew the old town. Amazon opened a first office in Kirchberg in 2012, and by 2019 the whole Luxembourg team had moved there, into what has since become a campus of eight buildings on Avenue John F. Kennedy. More than 4,250 permanent employees work in Luxembourg, drawn from over 100 nationalities, their roles ranging from product and programme management to software development and engineering across Amazon Stores, Operations, Devices and Amazon Web Services. The mix makes the campus one of the most international workplaces in the city, where the company leases several buildings and displays its Customer Obsession mantra in neon. The Luxembourg entity, Amazon EU Sàrl, sits at the centre of this activity, booking the sales that flow through Amazon’s European marketplaces.

Twenty years and counting

Amazon marked its twentieth year in Luxembourg in 2023 and called the Grand Duchy its home in Europe. The commitment shows in the numbers. The group reports investing more than 11 billion euros in the country since 2010, including over 1.8 billion in 2024 alone, spanning infrastructure and employee pay. STATEC, the national statistics agency, ranks Amazon among Luxembourg’s largest employers, and a third-party study put the company’s total employment impact, direct and indirect, above 10,500 jobs in 2024, alongside a contribution of more than 700 million euros to national output that year, and cumulative additions to Luxembourg’s GDP exceeding 3.9 billion euros.Luxembourg’s prime minister and Amazon’s leadership have met in Seattle to underline the strategic weight of the partnership. The campus has hosted royal visitors, among them the Grand Duke. Two decades after its arrival, Luxembourg remains the continental counterpart to a head office that has never left Seattle.