Amazon’s new home: 1515 Wynkoop, Denver, Colorado. (Business Wire Photo)

Amazon plans hire 400 tech workers in Denver, Colo., more than doubling the tech giant’s presence in the region.

The news: Today Amazon announced it will open a new office in Downtown Denver with 98,000 square feet of space. The Denver Tech Hub will accommodate the 400 new workers on top of the 350 employees Amazon already has in the area. The new roles will be in engineering, cloud computing, and advertising.

HQ-everywhere: Over the past year, 20 cities competed for “Amazon HQ2,” the company’s remarkable contest for a 50,000-person second headquarters outside its hometown, Seattle. Many runner-ups expressed disappointment when Amazon picked New York City and Northern Virginia to split the project and jobs. Amazon ultimately pulled out of New York, promising to spread the 25,000 jobs that would’ve gone there across the company’s 17 North American tech hubs. Today’s announcement comes just a month after Amazon announced it will hire 800 tech workers in HQ2 runner-up Austin.

Why it matters: HQ2 spectators have long said that the contest wasn’t really about picking one location for Amazon’s second headquarters. Rather, it was an ingenious strategy to get cities to hand over reams of valuable data that could inform Amazon’s growth throughout North America.

Early on, prominent urbanists like Richard Florida called Amazon’s contest a “large-scale, crowdsourced corporate locational strategy.” When Amazon announced the HQ2 winners, Florida told GeekWire, “It wouldn’t surprise me to hear, in coming months, ‘We’re going to put a Latin American headquarters in Miami, we’re going to put a major artificial intelligence and self-driving vehicle facility in Pittsburgh.'”

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