Amazon confirmed plans to hire 2,000 new employees in Boston Tuesday, in a move that would nearly triple the Seattle e-commerce giant’s presence there.
Amazon will expand into 430,000 square feet of office space in Boston’s waterfront Seaport district. The 2,000 jobs will be in areas like machine learning and speech science, cloud computing, and robotics, the company said. The new office will open in 2021.
“This project is a tremendous vote of confidence in our economy, and will be a welcome addition to Boston’s growing and thriving workforce and business landscape,” Bostom Mayor Martin Walsh said in a press release.
In March, Boston approved a $5 million property tax break to land the 2,000 jobs Amazon announced Tuesday. The city will grant Amazon the tax breaks over 15 years. If Amazon adds 4,000 jobs and expands to a second office building, an additional $5 million in tax breaks could be possible.
The deal is independent of Amazon HQ2, the company’s search for a second headquarters city where it will establish an outpost equal to its original Seattle headquarters.
Boston is one of 20 candidates in the running for HQ2 and it’s easy to see Tuesday’s announcement as a hint that the city is in the lead. But Amazon is hiring aggressively in cities all over the world. Just yesterday, the company announced plans to expand its Vancouver operation by 3,000 workers and 416,000 square feet of office space. Amazon also said it will add 200 tech jobs in Minneapolis Monday. Vancouver and Minneapolis, however, are not in the running for HQ2.
