Los almacenes y centros logísticos más grandes de Europa: Polonia, Alemania y más allá

TL;DR

Europe's biggest single warehouses are concentrated in Poland and Germany, driven by motorway access, port proximity and Amazon's continued expansion across both countries. This guide ranks the largest known facilities by gross internal floor area in square metres, with every figure sourced and dated, and covers why Poland and Germany dominate before looking at the Netherlands, Czechia and Spain as the next tier of major hubs.

Key Takeaways

Warehouse size claims circulate widely online with little sourcing and frequently contradict each other, which is exactly the gap this guide is built to close. Here is what a properly sourced picture actually shows.

• Poland's biggest single-building warehouse, Panattoni's A2 Warsaw Park, measures close to 104,000 square metres, confirmed directly by the developer
• Germany's largest known Amazon facilities cluster around 110,000 to 130,000 square metres, though several figures come from secondary rather than primary sources
• Poland's advantage rests on labour costs and motorway access to Germany; Germany's rests on market size and Central European positioning
• Europe's single largest dedicated logistics park by land area is actually in the UK, not Poland or Germany, which is worth knowing before assuming size always tracks with these two markets
• The biggest warehouse is almost never the right warehouse for a growing ecommerce brand, covered directly in the honest limitations section

Read the methodology before treating any single figure as definitive, since warehouse size data is genuinely inconsistent across the industry.

Why Warehouse Geography Matters Beyond Property Analysts

Warehouse size rankings usually live in industrial property trade publications, written for developers and investors rather than ecommerce brands. That is a missed opportunity, because where Europe's biggest logistics infrastructure sits, and why it ended up there, tells a UK ecommerce brand something genuinely useful: which countries have built the labour markets, motorway networks and land availability to support large-scale fulfilment, and which are becoming worth a serious look for EU stock holding. What European fulfilment involves covers the practical side of that decision, and this guide covers the infrastructure context underneath it.

This guide is written for a UK ecommerce brand curious about the shape of European logistics, whether purely out of interest or as background research before an EU expansion decision. It is not a claim that a brand needs anything close to the scale covered below. The facilities in this ranking are built for Amazon-level throughput and major retail distribution, not for a brand shipping a few thousand orders a month, and this guide addresses that gap directly later on.

It is also worth being upfront about a structural challenge in writing honestly on this topic: warehouse size data is one of the most poorly sourced categories of information available online. A single facility's footprint gets quoted in square feet on one site, square metres on another, and a multi-building park's total land area on a third, often without any of the three noting which figure they are actually reporting. This guide treats that inconsistency as a fact to work around rather than something to paper over, which is why the methodology section below is more detailed than a typical listicle on this subject would bother to include.

The Ranking Table

The table below lists the largest known warehouse facilities across Poland and Germany, ranked by gross internal floor area in square metres, the metric used consistently throughout this guide. Every figure carries its source and access date, and where a widely circulated figure could not be confirmed against a primary source, it is marked accordingly rather than presented as fact.

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This is a partial ranking rather than an exhaustive one, and it should be read that way. Several large facilities across both countries do not publish their floor area at all, and this guide follows the rule set out in its own methodology: where a figure is not disclosed, it is marked as such rather than estimated. A genuinely complete top ten would require direct confirmation from every major operator and developer active in both markets, which sits beyond what public sourcing alone can currently support.

It is worth noting what this table does not include as much as what it does. Several large German and Polish facilities operated by major retailers, grocery chains and third-party logistics groups almost certainly exceed some of the figures listed above, but their owners have not published a specific floor area in any source this guide could verify. Their absence from the table reflects disclosure, not size, and readers should not treat this ranking as proof that these five facilities are definitively the five largest in either country.

Methodology

This ranking uses one metric throughout: gross internal floor area in square metres, the standard measure used by industrial property developers and the clearest like-for-like basis for comparing warehouse size. Figures expressed elsewhere in square feet have been converted, and figures describing a multi-building campus are noted as such, since combining several buildings under one site name is a common source of inflated or inconsistent size claims across the industry.

Sources used, each with an access date recorded, include operator- and developer-published figures from companies such as Panattoni and GLP, Amazon's own published fulfilment centre announcements where available, and third-party industry reporting where a primary source could not be located. Where a figure comes from a secondary source rather than the operator's own publication, this is stated explicitly and flagged for verification, consistent with the honest sourcing standard the rest of Gonini's resource library follows, including Europe's largest ports by cargo volume, which uses the same sourcing discipline for a related infrastructure ranking.

For this ranking, a single facility means one contiguous building under one roof, rather than a multi-building logistics park counted as a single combined figure. This distinction matters because published figures for the same site often disagree depending on whether a park's total footprint or a single building's footprint is cited, and conflating the two is one of the most common ways warehouse size claims contradict each other across sources. A logistics park spanning several hundred thousand square metres across a dozen separate buildings is a genuinely different thing to measure than a single warehouse under one roof, and treating the two as comparable produces exactly the kind of inconsistent, unsourced claims this guide is trying to avoid.

This distinction becomes directly relevant when discussing Europe's largest dedicated logistics park overall, which is worth addressing here rather than leaving as an unexplained aside elsewhere in this guide. Magna Park Lutterworth, in the English Midlands, is widely described in industry sources as Europe's largest dedicated logistics park by combined land area and building count, spanning multiple millions of square feet across dozens of individual buildings developed over several decades. It sits in the UK, not Poland or Germany, and its scale comes from being a park containing many buildings rather than any single warehouse under one roof matching the scale of the individual facilities ranked in the table above. This is a useful reminder that "biggest logistics hub" and "biggest single warehouse" are two different questions, and a ranking answering one should not be mistaken for an answer to the other.

Poland

Poland has become one of the most significant logistics markets in Central Europe over roughly the past fifteen years, and understanding why helps explain much of the size and investment trends visible in the ranking above.

Why Poland Became Central European Logistics

Poland's rise as a logistics hub rests on a combination of factors that reinforced each other over time. Labour costs remain meaningfully lower than in Western Europe, which matters enormously for warehouse operations that are still relatively labour-intensive despite rising automation. Poland's motorway network, particularly the A2 running east to west, gives direct access to Germany, its largest trading partner, with trade between the two countries exceeding 120 billion euros annually according to Panattoni's own account of the region. Fulfilment providers in Poland cover this practical trading relationship from an operator's perspective, and it is worth reading alongside this infrastructure context.

Poland's EU membership also removed the customs friction that would otherwise complicate using it as a base for onward distribution across the rest of the bloc, and this combination- cheap labour, strong road links to Germany, and frictionless EU market access- made Poland an obvious choice for developers and major retailers alike once eCommerce volume began scaling sharply across the 2010s. Land availability played a role too. Poland had, and in many regions still has, considerably more available land for large-scale industrial development than the more built-up logistics corridors of Western Germany, the Netherlands or the UK, which meant developers such as Panattoni could build the scale of single-building facility seen in the ranking above without the site constraints that would apply in a more land-scarce Western European market.

The result of these forces compounding together over more than a decade is a market that now genuinely rivals, and in some single-building cases exceeds, the scale of warehouse development seen in far longer-established Western European logistics markets, which is a notable achievement for a market that was a comparatively minor player in European logistics as recently as the early 2000s.

The Major Hubs: Warsaw, Poznan, Wroclaw, Lodz, Gdansk

Warsaw and its surrounding region host some of Poland's largest individual facilities, including the A2 Warsaw Park development covered in the ranking above, positioned specifically to serve both the Warsaw metropolitan market and onward distribution along the A2 corridor toward Germany. Poznan, close to the German border, has developed as a major hub specifically because of that border proximity, making it a natural choice for operators prioritising fast access into Germany over serving the Polish domestic market.

Wroclaw has grown as a logistics centre partly on the back of its manufacturing base, with warehousing developing alongside industrial production rather than purely to serve ecommerce distribution. This gives Wroclaw a somewhat different character to Warsaw or Poznan, since a meaningful share of its warehouse space supports component and finished-goods storage tied to nearby factories rather than pure ecommerce fulfilment throughput.

Lodz sits centrally within Poland and has become a genuinely national distribution point, benefiting from motorway connections running in multiple directions rather than toward any single border. Its central position makes it a natural choice for an operator whose priority is even coverage of the Polish domestic market itself, rather than fast onward access to any one neighbouring country. Gdansk's position on the Baltic coast gives it a different role again, serving as an import gateway for goods arriving by sea before onward distribution inland, complementing Europe's busiest ports rather than competing with the inland hubs covered above. A meaningful share of the goods that eventually pass through Warsaw, Poznan, or Lodz's warehouse space arrives in the country through Gdansk first, making it a foundational part of the Polish logistics picture even though it rarely appears in warehouse size rankings itself.

Cost, Labour and the Trade-Offs

Poland's cost advantage is real but has narrowed over the past decade as wages have risen and the market has matured, so a brand evaluating Poland purely on older cost comparisons should verify current figures rather than rely on outdated benchmarks. Why Poland works as a fulfilment base covers this trade-off in more depth, including labour availability in specific regions, which has become a genuine constraint in some of the most developed logistics corridors as multiple large operators compete for the same local workforce.

For a brand considering Poland specifically, the trade-off is speed to Western European markets versus the Polish domestic market, which remains smaller than Germany's or France's. A facility positioned well for onward distribution into Germany does not automatically serve French or Spanish demand with the same speed, and this distinction matters more than the headline cost advantage for a brand whose EU demand spreads across several countries rather than concentrating near Poland's western border. A brand should also factor in that the labour market tightness now visible in Poland's most developed corridors, Warsaw and Poznan in particular, can mean staffing a new facility takes longer and costs more than a cost comparison built on national average wage data alone would suggest.

Germany

Germany's position in European logistics differs from Poland's in almost every respect except scale, and understanding that difference matters for a brand weighing the two markets.

Germany's Position in European Distribution

Germany is the largest single ecommerce market in the EU by a clear margin, and its logistics infrastructure reflects that domestic demand more than any transit role serving neighbouring countries. Warehousing services in Germany cover this domestic-demand-driven market in practical terms. While Poland's biggest facilities are often positioned to support onward distribution, several of Germany's largest sites, including Amazon's cluster of fulfilment centres, exist primarily to serve German consumers directly rather than route stock elsewhere in Europe.

This distinction shows up clearly in the ranking above. The Hamburg-area facility developed by GLP for Amazon was built explicitly as a same-day delivery hub for Northern Germany, and the Bad Hersfeld complex serves as what several sources describe as the central hub for Amazon's entire German operation, reflecting Germany's status as Amazon's largest single European market by fulfilment centre count. Third-party sourcing guides for Amazon sellers describe Amazon operating more than twenty-five fulfilment and sortation facilities across Germany in total, which, even allowing for some imprecision in how that figure is compiled, illustrates the sheer density of large-scale logistics infrastructure the German market alone supports.

The Major Hubs: Rhine-Ruhr, Hamburg, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Bad Hersfeld

The Rhine-Ruhr region in western Germany combines dense population, strong road and rail connectivity, and proximity to the Netherlands and Belgium, making it a natural hub for distribution reaching both German and Benelux demand from a single location. Hamburg's logistics significance comes directly from its port, Germany's largest, and the Hamburg-area Amazon facility in the ranking above was positioned specifically to combine port access with a base for Northern European same-day delivery.

Leipzig has become one of Amazon's most established German locations, with its LEJ1 facility among the company's earlier fulfilment centres in the country and central Germany's rail and motorway links supporting onward national distribution. Frankfurt's significance rests heavily on its airport, one of Europe's busiest cargo hubs, making the surrounding region a natural fit for time-sensitive and international freight rather than purely domestic eCommerce distribution. Bad Hersfeld sits almost exactly at Germany's geographic centre, along the A4 and A7 motorway corridors, which explains why Amazon chose it as the reported hub for its entire German network rather than positioning that role near any single major city. The geographic logic here mirrors Lodz's role in Poland: a genuinely central location trades proximity to any single major population centre for even, balanced access to the whole country.

Cost, Labour and the Trade-Offs

Germany's labour and property costs run meaningfully higher than Poland's, and this gap has not narrowed the way Poland's cost advantage has. A brand choosing Germany over Poland is generally paying for proximity to German consumer demand and Western European market access rather than for cost efficiency, and this trade-off should be stated plainly rather than obscured behind a general "Germany is a strong logistics market" claim that does not actually help a brand decide between the two.

German fulfilment companies compared covers the practical cost and provider landscape in more detail. The clearest case for choosing Germany specifically, rather than a cheaper neighbouring location, is when German domestic demand makes up a large enough share of a brand's EU sales that delivery speed within Germany itself outweighs the cost saving available from a Polish or Central European base serving Germany at one remove. A brand shipping predominantly to German customers, in other words, is usually better served accepting Germany's higher cost base than trying to serve that same demand more cheaply from just across the Polish border, since the delivery speed difference between the two options compounds across every single order rather than being a one-off saving.

Other Major European Hubs

Poland and Germany dominate this ranking, but three further countries are worth covering briefly for a genuinely complete picture of European logistics geography.

Netherlands

The Netherlands punches well above its physical size in European logistics, built on the strength of Rotterdam, Europe's largest port by cargo volume, and Schiphol's position as a major air cargo hub. The Dutch fulfilment advantage explains why the country works particularly well as a single hub for a brand whose EU demand spans several Western European countries rather than concentrating in any one market, since its central position and infrastructure quality offer fast access to Germany, France, Belgium and the UK simultaneously. This makes the Netherlands a genuinely different proposition from Poland or Germany: rather than competing on scale or serving one dominant domestic market, its advantage is almost purely central positioning and transport quality.

Czechia

Czechia has developed a meaningful logistics presence partly through spillover from Germany's manufacturing base and partly through its own Central European position, similar in some respects to Poland's advantage but with a smaller overall market. It has become a genuine option for operators seeking Central European access without Poland's specific scale of competition for warehouse space and labour in the most developed corridors, and its proximity to southern Germany specifically gives it an angle Poland's more northerly and westerly-focused infrastructure does not replicate as directly.

Spain

Spain's logistics significance concentrates around Madrid and Barcelona, serving both the substantial Spanish domestic ecommerce market and, to a lesser extent, Portugal. It sits geographically apart from the Poland, Germany, Netherlands and Czechia cluster covered above, making it a relevant addition specifically for a brand with meaningful Iberian demand rather than a general-purpose Western or Central European hub choice. A brand whose EU sales concentrate in Northern and Central Europe gains relatively little from a Spanish base, while a brand with genuine Spanish or Portuguese demand finds little equivalent advantage in any of the four countries covered above it in this guide.

What This Means If You Are Choosing an EU Fulfilment Location

None of the size rankings above should be read as a direct recommendation for where a growing ecommerce brand should hold stock, since the facilities covered are built for a completely different scale of operation. What the geography does offer is a genuine decision framework, and four factors matter more than raw warehouse size for a brand actually making this choice.

Proximity to your customers matters more than proximity to the biggest logistics infrastructure. A brand with concentrated German demand benefits from a German base regardless of Poland's cost advantage, while a brand with EU demand spread across several countries is usually better served by a central hub such as the Netherlands or Poland than by chasing the single largest facility in any one market. Carrier networks matter almost as much as raw location, since a warehouse's delivery speed depends entirely on which couriers serve it well, and this varies by specific site rather than by country in general. Fulfilment across borders and how to scale it covers how to weigh these factors in practice.

Labour costs and VAT position round out the decision. Poland's labour cost advantage has narrowed but remains real, while Germany's higher costs are generally justified only by proximity to genuinely concentrated German demand. Clearing customs into the EU and the VAT implications of holding stock in any specific EU country should be worked through with the same rigour as the delivery-speed decision, since a location that looks ideal on a map can carry meaningfully different compliance overhead depending on where it sits. A brand should also factor in how easily a chosen location can scale further if EU demand grows faster than expected, since a facility in a labour-constrained corridor may struggle to expand its workforce as quickly as a brand's order volume requires, regardless of how well the location scored on every other criterion at the time of the original decision.

Honest Limitations

The biggest warehouse in Europe, whichever facility that title genuinely belongs to once every unpublished figure is accounted for, is almost never the right warehouse for a growing ecommerce brand. These facilities serve Amazon-scale operations and large national retailers processing volumes that a brand shipping a few thousand orders a month will not approach for years, if ever, and choosing a fulfilment location based on which country hosts the biggest infrastructure says nothing useful about which location actually suits a smaller operation.

Published warehouse size figures are also genuinely inconsistent across the industry, and this guide's own ranking table reflects that reality honestly rather than papering over it. Several figures used above come from secondary sources rather than the operator's own publication, and are flagged accordingly. A reader treating any single number in this space as definitive, from this guide or any other, should recheck it against a primary source before relying on it for a serious decision, since warehouse size claims circulate and get repeated across multiple sites without anyone tracing them back to an original, verifiable figure. This guide has tried harder than most to separate confirmed figures from repeated but unverified ones, but the underlying data landscape means even a careful attempt like this one will inevitably leave some genuinely large facilities uncounted simply because their operators have never published a figure at all.

FAQ

What is the biggest warehouse in Europe?

Based on available sourced figures, Amazon's Hamburg-area facility developed by GLP is 130,000 square metres, though several unpublished facilities may be larger.

Why is Poland a major logistics hub?

Lower labour costs, strong motorway access to Germany, and frictionless EU market access; see why Poland works as a fulfilment base.

Where are Amazon's biggest warehouses in Germany?

Bad Hersfeld is widely reported as Amazon's largest German hub, though this figure comes from a secondary source rather than Amazon directly.

Is it cheaper to warehouse stock in Poland or Germany?

Generally, Poland is cheaper, though the gap has narrowed; Germany's higher cost suits brands with concentrated German demand.

Do I need a big warehouse to sell across Europe?

No. See scaling fulfilment across borders for how smaller brands approach EU expansion.

Which EU country is best for ecommerce fulfilment?

It depends on where your demand concentrates; see en qué consiste el cumplimiento de pedidos en Europa para los factores de decisión.

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