Amazon Web Services has been a quiet, yet important, moneymaker for the Amazon brand as a whole. And as more digital companies rely on Amazon for its cloud- and web-hosting services, AWS will continue to grow as a business.
Amazon announced Monday that it will be expanding AWS by opening a new office in Redmond — not far from its main headquarters in Seattle. The new facility will include 111,000 square feet of office space in the Redmond Town Center building in downtown Redmond.
With this expansion, Amazon will also create 600 new jobs. The company says that these jobs will be for various tech and engineering roles in order to support AWS’s database services.
The Redmond office is expected to open in 2021.
“Our new Redmond office is part of our plan to continue growing and creating jobs in the Puget Sound region,” John Schoettler, Amazon VP of global real estate and facilities, said in a statement. “In addition to Redmond’s strong existing talent pool and close access to our Seattle and Bellevue locations, these new facilities will also provide more flexible work options for employees, allowing us to continue our sustainable growth in the region for years to come.”
When the office opens in 2021, Amazon will be just a few miles away from the Microsoft headquarters, which has been in the neighborhood since 1986. But Redmond isn’t the only Seattle suburb that Amazon is expanding in. Earlier this year, Amazon revealed its plans to build a skyscraper in Bellevue, which will be home to 15,000 new jobs over the next few years.
Amazon has also been on a global hiring spree since the COVID-19 pandemic has boosted the demand for e-commerce. The company pledged to hire 100,000 full- and part-time workers in mid-March, and then announced it was hiring another 75,000 people just a month later.
