Amazon.com Inc. said on Thursday it would create more than 100,000 full-time jobs in the United States over the next 18 months.

The staffing up will help the e-commerce giant as it pushes into categories from groceries to hardware, online video, fashion, cloud services and multiple tiers of delivery services. Many of the jobs will be in new fulfillment centers, the company said in a statement Thursday.

Seattle-based Amazon said it plans to increase its full-time U.S.-based workforce to more than 280,000 by mid-2018 from 180,000 in 2016. Amazon had about 230,800 full-time and part-time employees as of Dec. 31, 2015.

“These jobs are not just in our Seattle headquarters or in Silicon Valley—they’re in our customer service network, fulfillment centers and other facilities in local communities throughout the country,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder and CEO.

Bezos said he plans to add another 100,000 new jobs "across the company over the next 18 months as we open new fulfillment centers, and continue to invent in areas like cloud technology, machine learning, and advanced logistics.”

Over the past five years, Amazon has created more than 150,000 jobs in the U.S., growing it’s workforce to 180,000 at the end of last year. Amazon businesses like Marketplace and Amazon Flex will also create hundreds of thousands of jobs for people who want the flexibility to be an entrepreneur and set their own schedule, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant said.

(Newsmax wire services and Reuters and Bloomberg contributed to this report).

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