Amazon sets cap for Seattle growth in coming years; canceled New York jobs will likely go elsewhere
Amazon will end its growth in Seattle in coming years after its offices under construction open, and the 25,000 jobs intended for New York will be mostly spread across its various North American tech hubs outside Seattle, the company said.
The company announced in a surprise blog post Thursday morning that it was canceling plans for a second headquarters in Long Island City, New York, just a few months after unveiling its intentions to split 50,000 jobs between New York and Northern Virginia. It also said it would not reopen its HQ2 search.
A spokesman said Thursday that the jobs that had been intended for New York will be created, just mostly in other cities. The focus will be on its 15 U.S. offices outside its Seattle headquarters, which include New York and also the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Boston, plus the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver, B.C.
Seattle could still get some of those jobs or benefit indirectly, though it’s too early to say, the company said.
Amazon last said a year ago that it had 10 million square feet of offices in Seattle, about one- fifth of the city’s Class A office space, the biggest share of any company in any big city in America. It now says it has 12 million, the equivalent of adding three huge skyscrapers in the last year.
Amazon had said previously that it planned to grow to at least 14 million square feet based on its current and planned construction, though the ultimate size of its Seattle headquarters was unclear. But for the first time Thursday, it said that 14 million square feet would be “the completion of our Seattle campus.”
The growth to come — that extra 2 million square feet — is still huge; no other company in Seattle has that much Class A office space, in total. So hiring will continue as the company moves into those new buildings, which will likely take at least a couple years since those offices are under construction.
Amazon has slightly more than 45,000 employees in Seattle, up from 40,000 a year ago, and is by far the city’s biggest employer. As of Thursday, it had about 9,300 open positions in the city.
In all, the company has about 44 offices in Seattle, mostly in South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle.
In addition, the company has two large offices it occupies or plans to occupyin downtown Bellevue. It’s unclear if the company could grow more there.