Boston Lands Major Amazon Lease Deal (Not HQ2)
The Seattle-based mega online retailer has signed a lease for 430,000 square feet of office space at WS Development's and PSP Investments’ 23-acre Boston Seaport development.
BOSTON—While the winner of Amazon’s HQ2 sweepstakes is still to be decided, the City of Boston landed a major lease deal with Amazon that will create 2,000 tech jobs here in the next three years.
Amazon announced on Tuesday that it will be expanding its Boston Tech Hub and adding 2,000 positions here in the machine learning, speech science, cloud computing and robotics engineering fields among others. Amazon expects to open the doors to its new facility at the Boston Seaport development in 2021.
The Seattle-based mega online retailer has signed a lease for 430,000 square feet of office space at WS Development’s and PSP Investments’ 23-acre Boston Seaport development. Amazon will occupy all of the office space in a 525,000-square-foot building to be constructed on Block L4 of the Boston Seaport development. The new 17-story mixed-use building is being designed by a collaboration of Gensler’s San Francisco and Boston offices. The building will also contain two levels of retail and will front on Harbor Square Park.
Amazon’s teams based in the Boston metropolitan area primarily focus on Alexa, Amazon Web Services and Audible. Specifically, Boston-based Amazon machine learning scientists and engineers contribute to enhancing the experience of customers interacting with Alexa, the company states.
Rohit Prasad, VP and head scientist of Amazon Alexa, says, “In just a few years, we’ve grown from a handful of software developers and scientists to a team of more than 1,200, inventing new capabilities and products on behalf of millions of customers around the world. Thank you to all our partners across the city and the state for welcoming us, helping us create these thousands of new jobs, and contributing to the already vibrant tech industry in the area.”
Amazon notes that with its customer fulfillment facilities, it has created more than 3,500 jobs in Massachusetts and since 2011 has invested more than $400 million in the state.
Five years ago Amazon opened its corporate office in Cambridge, which has served as the anchor for its Boston Tech Hub. The company has recently added office locations in the Back Bay and Fort Point neighborhoods, in addition to the Amazon Robotics development center in North Reading, MA.
“We are proud to welcome Amazon to Boston’s Seaport, a neighborhood that has grown to serve forward-thinking employers, residents, and retailers and which has now become a global hub of innovation and talent,” says Jeremy Sclar, president of WS Development.
WS Development expects construction to start on the project later this year and envisions completion in 2021. The Boston Seaport development is the largest single development project under construction in the city with a full build-out projected at 7.6 million square feet of residential, hotel, office, retail, entertainment, civic and cultural space, as well as public open spaces. The Boston Seaport development is already home to such new retailers as L.L. Bean, Bonobos, Warby Parker, Lululemon, Outdoor Voices, Filson, Peter Millar, and pop-up collective For Now.
The development of the new 525,000-square-foot building will also result in the construction of numerous district-wide transportation improvements, including new protected bicycle infrastructure, a new MBTA Silver Line headhouse at Courthouse Station and numerous streetscape improvements throughout the Seaport, WS Development officials note. The project will also provide approximately $4.4 million for the creation of affordable housing in Boston, as well as $875,000 in job training funding in the City of Boston.
Amazon earlier this week struck a major expansion deal in Canada. On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Amazon will create 3,000 new jobs in Vancouver. Combined with the 1,000 new jobs announced by Amazon in November 2017, the expansion will bring the company’s workforce in Canada to more than 9,000 employees.
Amazon will expand into a brand new location in QuadReal’s The Post redevelopment when the project opens in 2022. Amazon’s future 416,000-square-foot Development Centre will sit above the former central Canada Post building.
While Vancouver is not in the running for the much coveted second headquarters location for Amazon (dubbed Amazon HQ2) Toronto as well as Boston are in the running for the designation. Amazon announced a total of 20 metropolitan areas that are in the running for the second headquarters requirement and has stated that it will make a selection sometime this year.