Amazon is growing its footprint in Boston, expanding an office that handles everything from game development to speech recognition.
The company signed a new lease in April that expanded its presence to include six floors of an office building in the city, according to a report by Xconomy.
While Amazon isn’t commenting, the additional room will certainly be helpful for the company’s continually growing workforce. Amazon added 7,000 employees to its payroll last quarter, and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down its employee growth.
Xconomy estimates that Amazon’s expanded footprint could be enough to host 800 employees. Right now, there are about 300 people on LinkedIn who list themselves as Amazon employees in the Boston area.
The Seattle-based company grabbed a foothold in Massachusetts after acquiring warehouse automation firm Kiva Systems in 2012. Since then, the company has continued to increase its presence in Boston, which is a popular expansion site for a number of technology companies. Apple opened an office in Boston last year to be closer to Nuance, which provides speech recognition services for Siri.
Amazon lists Boston as one of its key cities for speech technology, and given the company’s increased use of voice recognition to power products like the Fire TV, expanding its presence there makes a lot of sense.
Amazon is in the midst of a serious growth spurt right now, as evidenced by this chart.
