West 8th

Amazon.com added more than 8,000 employees during the third quarter — a mind-numbing hiring pace for the Seattle-based online retailer. And where are they going to put all of those folks?

Last month, we reported that the company was poised to take over several floors in the West 8th office building located at 8th and Westlake avenues in downtown Seattle. At the time, real estate sources told GeekWire that the company was planning to take over about 300,000 square feet of space in the two-year-old building, enough to house as many as 1,200 workers.

Amazon.com representatives didn’t respond to comments at the time of that story, and we’ve still yet to track down official word on the plans. (UPDATE: An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment).

The Seattle Times reports today, citing planning documents, that the company is taking 14 floors in the building for about about 280,000 square feet. That would represent the remaining space in the 28-story, 500,000 square foot tower.

West 8th also is home to the Seattle offices of Salesforce.com and the Casey Family Programs.

We’ve reached out to brokers and property managers for the building, and we’ll update this post as we hear more.

But Amazon.com’s growth in downtown and the surrounding South Lake Union neighborhood is pretty insane. Just yesterday, we reported on a new large Starbucks Coffee store at 440 Terry Ave. N., on the first floor of one of the buildings in Amazon’s new headquarters complex.

Amazon.com, which now employs more than 50,000 people worldwide, is certainly transforming a corner of downtown Seattle with its new South Lake Union campus.

That’s a far cry from the company’s early days in a converted Bellevue garage and a warehouse in Seattle’s Sodo neighborhood, and until earlier this year its old headquarters building on Beacon Hill.

In addition to the West 8th space, we previously reported that Amazon.com was looking at taking space in the former Onvia headquarters building at 1260 Mercer Street.

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