Amazon has inked a deal to open its next headquarters in midtown Manhattan at Hudson Yards less than a year after withdrawing a plan to open a headquarters in Queens, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Friday (Dec. 6).
The eCommerce giant has signed a lease for 335,000 square feet at 410 Tenth Ave. between 33rd and 34th Streets where it will have more than 1,500 employees when it opens in 2021. Amazon said it is taking the space in the property, which is being redeveloped, without any of the special tax credits it had been offered previously.
Facebook signed a lease for a 1.5 million-square-foot campus at Hudson Yards, several blocks further west from Amazon’s planned location. Combined with Facebook’s other NYC offices, the Hudson Yards campus would bring its total footprint in the city to more than 3 million square feet. The move would rank the social media giant alongside some of Manhattan’s biggest corporate tenants.
“It’s clear the main reason Amazon wanted to be here was the availability of a skilled tech workforce plus the synergy with related industries,” said James Parrott, an economist at the New School. “And New York City still retains that attraction.”
Google is also in the midst of a major NYC expansion and has plans to add 7,000 employees over the next 10 years. The search giant’s parent company Alphabet also signed a lease earlier this year for 1.3 million square feet at a Hudson Square neighborhood and in two other buildings nearby.
“Google is forming its own community and campus,” said Victor Rodriguez, associate director of analytics at CoStar Group Inc., a real-estate data firm. “It looks like Facebook wants to do something similar.”
From 2009-18, tech-sector job growth in NYC has grown almost four times as quickly as the city’s overall private job growth, according to Mr. Parrott’s analysis.
A talent war in New York started heating up earlier this year when Amazon opened up its second headquarters in the city and Google began expanding its presence.
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