The problem of packing ellipsoids in the n-dimensional space is considered in the present work. The proposed approach combines heuristic techniques with the resolution of recently introduced nonlinear programming models in order to construct solutions with a large number of ellipsoids. Numerical experiments illustrate that the introduced approach delivers good quality solutions with a computational cost that scales linearly with the number of ellipsoids; and a solution with more than a million ellipsoids in the three-dimensional space is exhibited.