Amazon hasn’t pursued future development in the city since its public spat with the City Council over a short-lived per-employee tax in 2018. Instead, it shifted its growth to Bellevue and Redmond, dubbing the entire Puget Sound region as its HQ1. The company has more than 14,000 employees in Bellevue, according to the city’s latest financial report.
Growth aside, Amazon’s workforce in Seattle has been shaped by other factors since its peak during the pandemic.
As the pandemic waned and workers continued to stay home, Amazon and other tech companies seriously reconsidered their space needs. While Microsoft was moving out of office towers in Bellevue, Amazon was mirroring those actions in Seattle. Since 2020, Amazon has left at least six office buildings near its headquarters, totaling about 1 million square feet.
Amazon’s shrinking office footprint
Since 2020, Amazon has vacated six leased offices in the South Lake Union and Denny Triangle neighborhoods. It plans to leave a seventh office in May when the lease expires.
The company has also gone through massive waves of layoffs since 2020, the most recent of which affected about 3,300 employees in Seattle between October and January.
——-
Trivia: Amazon is no longer Seattle’s biggest employer.
State taxpayer-funded University of Washington (UW) now is.