New stats from Amazon reveal the company’s total spending on jobs and infrastructure in each U.S. state from 2010 to 2020 — showing where the tech giant has made its biggest bets over the past decade, and where it has big gaps left to fill.
Amazon released the numbers to show its positive impact across the country, at a time when other repercussions of its growth are increasingly in the news.
- The company spent more than $530 billion in the U.S. in the past decade on infrastructure (such as new facilities) and compensation for employees.
- Amazon says it created more U.S. jobs in the past decade than any other company, now employing more than 950,000 people in the country. (Amazon employs more than 1.3 million people total worldwide.)
- For 2010-2020, the numbers put Washington state way ahead of the pack with $129 billion in economic investment by the company.
- California ranked a distant second, at $81 billion in spending on jobs and infrastructure for the decade.
- Virginia, where Amazon is building its second headquarters, ranked third for the decade at $34 billion in spending by Amazon.
- Rounding out the top 10 were Texas ($29 billion), New Jersey ($23 billion), Kentucky ($20 billion), Florida ($18 billion), Pennsylvania ($17 billion), Arizona ($16 billion), and Indiana ($15 billion).
See state-by-state numbers on this Amazon map, and in our sortable list below.
Amazon’s investment total for the decade in Washington state is not a surprise, given its rapid growth in Seattle and more recently in nearby Bellevue, Wash.
On an annual basis, Amazon says it spent a record $167 billion on infrastructure and jobs across the country in 2020, as it grappled with the impact of COVID-19.
While the company released state-by-state investment numbers for the past decade, it declined GeekWire’s request to do the same for the past year.
However, by calculating the difference between the latest stats and past disclosures by the company, we can estimate that Amazon’s spending in Washington state was about $28 billion to $29 billion in the past year.
California was a much closer second in 2020 than it was for the full decade, with an estimated $26 billion in spending by Amazon for the year.
That reflects the rapid expansion of Amazon’s fulfillment centers and delivery hubs, as the company builds out its last-mile delivery capabilities throughout the country.
In one indication of that growth, Amazon employed more than 153,000 people in California as of the end of 2020, nearly twice as many as in Washington state.
However, many of Amazon’s jobs in its home state are high-paying engineering and business leadership roles. Amazon’s starting pay in its fulfilment and distribution network is $15/hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage, but it also employs a larger proportion of part-time workers in those positions.
Here is GeekWire’s sortable list of Amazon’s 2010-2020 investment totals by state, plus employment numbers from 2015 to 2020, pulled from data that we’ve compiled and maintained over the years as part of our reporting on the company.
