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=, where S , σ , κ , and T are the Seebeck coeffi cient, the electrical conductivity, the thermal conductivity, and the absolute temperature, respectively. Good thermoelectric materials possess the feature of "phonon glass, electron crystal." [ 1 ] The state-of-the-art strategies for improving ZT s for existing materials can generally be divided into two categories: one is to reduce the lattice thermal conductivity through nanostructuring or hierarchical architecturing; [2][3][4] the other is to enhance the electrical transport properties by resonant doping [ 5 ] or heavy band convergence. [ 6,7 ] Recently, Thermoelectric devices can directly convert thermal energy to electricity or vice versa with the effi ciency being determined by the materials' dimensionless fi gure of merit ( ZT ). Since the revival of interests in the last decades, substantial achievements have been reached in search of high-performance thermoelectric materials, especially in the high temperature regime. In the near-room-temperature regime, MgAgSb-based materials are recently obtained with ZT ≈ 0.9 at 300 K and ≈1.4 at 525 K, as well as a record high energy conversion effi ciency of 8.5%. However, the underlying mechanism responsible for the performance in this family of materials has been poorly understood. Here, based on structure refi nements, scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), NMR experiments, and density function theory (DFT) calculations, unique silver and magnesium ion migrations in α-MgAg 0.97 Sb 0.99 are disclosed. It is revealed that the local atomic disorders induced by concurrent ion migrations are the major origin of the low thermal conductivity and play an important role in the good ZT in MgAgSb-based materials.