Amazon is making room for some of the 25,000 employees it plans to add in Bellevue, Wash., announcing Tuesday that it has signed a lease to occupy a 600,000-square-foot office building called The Artise which is under development in the city east of Seattle.
Scheduled to open in 2024, the 25-story glass tower by Schnitzer West and architects NBBJ is at the corner of N.E. 8th Street and 106th Avenue N.E.
Amazon shared the lease news in an update to a previous blog post from September where it announced its growing intentions in Bellevue. The tech giant said at the time that its plans to add 10,000 employees would expand by another 15,000.
Amazon also said Tuesday that it will invest $185.5 million in below-market loans and grants to the King County Housing Authority to preserve up to 1,000 affordable homes on the Eastside, including units in Pinewood Village, Hampton Greens, and the Illahee Apartments. It’s part of Amazon’s $2 billion Housing Equity Fund, announced in January and aimed at offsetting the deepening economic divide in communities where the company is growing.
With its lease agreements, Amazon is poised to become downtown Bellevue’s largest tenant at roughly 5.5 million square feet, doubling the footprint of Microsoft.
In addition to The Artise, Amazon had landed another two million square feet of downtown Bellevue office space at new properties being developed by Vulcan: 555 Tower and West Main — both slated to open in 2023. 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.
Amazon 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.
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic has caused companies to reconsider where and how employees will work in the future, Amazon has been charging ahead with plans for physical office space in multiple cities, including Boston and Arlington, Va. — its so-called HQ2.
With more than 75,000 employees now in the region it calls home, Amazon has exhibited a strong desire to stretch further beyond the limits of Seattle, driven in part by disputes with the Seattle City Council over its impact on the community, and efforts by the city to impose new taxes on big businesses. In 2019, after a prior tax battle, the company announced plans to move its worldwide operations to Bellevue.
Amazon launched its highly-publicized HQ sweepstakes in 2019 as it planned to open a second North American headquarters. But the company decided to split the second headquarters between Northern Virginia and New York, and then dropped New York entirely.
In February, the company unveiled design plans for the headquarters campus in Arlington, Va., with renderings showing three tall office buildings ringing a unique glass-enclosed structure called “The Helix.”
