He was identified in US media reports as Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.
The 38-year-old was named after he was flown from Kuwait to the United States to face charges.
Sgt Bales was taken to the US Disciplinary Barracks at historic Fort Leavenworth, the only maximum security correctional facility operated by the defence department.
The army confirmed he will be held in solitary confinement pending charges.
Sgt Bales is believed to have walked off his base in southern Afghanistan before dawn on Sunday last week and gunned down villagers in their homes.
The incident has plunged tense Afghan-US relations into a tailspin, with President Hamid Karzai accusing America of failing to co-operate in the wake of the massacre.
He has said he is at "the end of the rope" over the shootings in a country where the number of civilian deaths have risen steadily over the past few years.
Relatives of the dead in Kandahar province have insisted there must have been more than one shooter and argued they did not receive all the information they asked for from Americans.
Sgt Bales is said by his lawyer to have been suffering stress after seeing his friend's leg blown off a day before the attack.
Defence lawyer John Henry Browne also said his client had been injured twice while serving in Iraq.
"He and his family were told that his tours in the Middle East were over. His family was counting on him not being redeployed," Mr Browne said.
"Literally overnight that changed. So I think it would be fair to say that he and the family were not happy that he was going back."
Mr Browne has dismissed as "nonsense" suggestions that Sgt Bales, who had trained as a sniper, had any marital or alcohol problems
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