The city of Bellevue, Wash., is looking more and more like Amazon’s actual second headquarters location.
The tech giant announced Friday that it will bring an additional 10,000 jobs to Bellevue, just 10 miles east of its downtown Seattle headquarters.
Amazon said in February it would expand to 15,000 employees in Bellevue over the next few years.
Now the company will add a total of 25,000 employees in the city — the same amount it expects to hire in Northern Virginia, or its so-called “HQ2.” Amazon already has thousands of employees in Bellevue, where the company originally started inside Jeff Bezos’ garage 26 years ago.
The company landed another two million square feet of office space in downtown Bellevue with two leases at new properties being developed by Vulcan: 555 Tower and West Main. Vulcan, the real estate company started by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is a longtime partner of Amazon that built out its South Lake Union headquarters in Seattle.
Construction on both buildings is expected to be completed by 2023.
“We are very excited to be working with Amazon again,” Ada M. Healey, chief real estate officer at Vulcan, said in a statement.
Amazon revealed today it is also developing another 27-story office tower at its Bellevue 600 project, where a 43-story tower is already planned for construction. Bellevue 600 will be built by 2025.
Amazon, which employs more than 50,000 people in and around its Seattle headquarters, has been at odds with the Seattle City Council for years over its impact on the community, and efforts by the city to impose new taxes on big businesses. Last year, after a prior tax battle, the company announced plans to move its worldwide operations to Bellevue.
Its announcement Friday comes a month after the Seattle City Council approved a new tax on the highest salaries at companies in the city with annual payroll expenses of $7 million or higher, generating an estimated $200 million yearly to fund relief for families negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and to alleviate Seattle’s homelessness crisis.
The Downtown Seattle Association sent a letter to the Council last month, asking it to reconsider the new payroll tax following a news report that Amazon polled employees about which communities they’d prefer to work from elsewhere in the region.
In a blog post, Amazon real estate chief John Schoettler called Bellevue “a growing, business-friendly community with great amenities, a high quality of life, and a fantastic talent pool.”
“We look forward to bringing more jobs to Bellevue — contributing to a regional growth strategy that can create opportunities for people across the Puget Sound,” Schoettler wrote.
Amazon launched its highly-publicized HQ sweepstakes in 2019 as it planned to open a second North American headquarters. But after the company decided to split the second headquarters between Northern Virginia and New York, and then drop New York entirely, Amazon’s plans for a giant HQ2 hub thousands of miles from Seattle became much more modest.
In another example of Amazon spreading its corporate footprint beyond Seattle, the company last month said it will spend $1.4 billion on nearly 1 million square feet of new physical office space in six U.S. cities: Dallas, Denver, Detroit, New York CIty, Phoenix, and San Diego.
The new leases in Bellevue and across the country reflect Amazon’s confidence in a return to the office in a post-pandemic world. Amazon in July extended its remote work policy to January. Amazon’s corporate offices are open now but the company says “employees who work in a role that can effectively be done from home are welcome to do so.”
Other tech companies such as Google and Facebook are allowing employees to work from home until next summer. Outdoor retailer REI said earlier this month that it will look to sell its brand new HQ in Bellevue due to the pandemic.
Last month Google bought more land in another eastside city, Kirkland, Wash., as it also expands its footprint in the Seattle region where the company employs nearly 6,000 people.
Amazon also said today it will give $1 million to the City of Bellevue’s Human Services Fund.
“Amazon’s continued investment in Bellevue, including today’s announcement of adding 10,000 well-paying jobs as well as a $1 million grant to the Humans Services Fund, is a major win for our community and region,” Bellevue Mayor Lynne Robinson said in a statement. “I want to thank the company for their generous support of critical services during this time of economic recovery. The city looks forward to expanding our partnership with Amazon and creating new opportunities for all Bellevue residents.”
Bezos started Amazon in the 1990s out of the garage of a 66-year-old house he rented — that sold for $1.5 million two years ago — in Bellevue, less than 2 miles north of its new downtown buildings. As the company grew, Bezos opted for a dense urban campus in Seattle over a suburban headquarters such as Microsoft in nearby Redmond, Wash., or Apple in the Bay Area.
Though Amazon’s growth in Bellevue is now centered in a city that some would consider a suburb, Amazon is sticking to its urban principles with the campus. All the offices are within a short walk of each other and are close to a future Sound Transit light rail station that will quickly shuttle people between Seattle and Bellevue when it opens in a few years.
Amazon in June said it will open a 111,000-square-foot office for more than 600 Amazon Web Services workers in Redmond, just three miles away from Microsoft’s headquarters.
Amazon stock has soared since mid-March as millions of customers rely on the e-commerce giant amid the pandemic for online shopping, cloud computing, and more. The company posted $88.9 billion in revenue for the quarter ending June 30, up 40% year-over-year.
The company has created 175,000 new jobs since March and is in the process of converting 125,000 of those roles into regular, full-time positions. Amazon’s employee count, not including contractors and temporary workers, reached 876,800 as of the end of the second quarter.
