Lego holds groundbreaking for $366M Prince George distribution center

The Lego Group held a ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday for its $366 million warehouse and distribution center in Prince George County.

The 2 million-square-foot building will be the largest regional distribution center in Lego‘s global network. The site is located at 8800 Wells Station Road in the county, about 20 miles from the $1 billion manufacturing facility the Danish toymaker is building in Chesterfield County, which was about 35% complete in early October.

“Virginia is Lego, and increasingly, Lego is Virginia, and that is such an exciting thing to say. The partnership between the Lego Group and the Commonwealth of Virginia is nothing sort of awesome,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said Thursday at the groundbreaking.

The company and Youngkin announced the facility in May. Lego started construction in the middle of this year, said Cindy Sikora, Lego’s vice president of supply chain operations for the Americas. The toymaker expects to open the distribution center in early 2027 and to open its factory in Chesterfield, expected to create about 1,760 jobs over 10 years, in January 2027.

Together, the facilities will form an integrated supply chain, Sikora said.

“Obviously, we’d have no products to distribute without the manufacturing,” she told reporters at the groundbreaking, “but also, we need to move the products that manufacturing creates, and so having those located together is super for us.”

The Prince George regional distribution center will be its sixth globally and the second in Lego’s Americas network, joining an existing center in Fort Worth, Texas.

“We currently have a distribution center in Texas, and we work with our manufacturing site in Mexico very closely, and we expect to have the same setup here,” Sikora said.

A third-party logistics company will operate the distribution center, which is standard for Lego distribution facilities, Sikora said. Lego expects that the facility will create about 300 jobs, but the logistics company will be doing the hiring. The announcement of which company that will be is “forthcoming,” Sikora said.

Lego has signed a built-to-suit lease for the regional distribution center with Crosspointe Commerce Center, a joint venture between Hillwood Investment Properties and The Silverman Group.

The toymaker aims to power the facility by using only renewable energy sources and hopes to achieve LEED Gold standard, the second-highest LEED certification from the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council.

Adding to its presence in Central Virginia, Lego opened a retail store in the Short Pump Town Center in Henrico County on Nov. 7.

“Think through that supply chain of innovation and that supply chain of creativity,” Youngkin said, “all the way from manufacturing right here in Virginia to distributing in Virginia, to buying and playing and innovating and being part of a child’s life right here in Virginia…

“One of the other things that many of you may not know is that when that child opens that Lego box and places his or her small hands on those bricks,” Youngkin continued, “it’s the first human hand to ever touch that brick. That is one of the great quality pledges of The Lego Group.”

Founded in 1932 by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, Lego reported 74.3 billion Danish Krone in 2024 revenue, equivalent to about $11.27 billion. It employs more than 31,000 people worldwide, including more than 3,500 employees in the United States.

Lego has had a presence in the U.S. since the 1960s, when it entered a partnership with Samsonite to manufacture and market its bricks in the country. In 1973, the company established its American subsidiary, Lego Systems, after the license agreement with Samsonite for the U.S. market was cancelled. The toymaker is moving its U.S. headquarters from Enfield, Connecticut, where it has been since 1975, to Boston in 2026.