Amazon is restarting construction on a 42-story office tower in Bellevue, Wash., to complete 22 floors of the building’s interior and make room for an additional 3,000 employees.
Located at 555 108th Ave. N.E., Sonic is currently home to about 1,500 employees, who began arriving last September. With the addition of 500,000 square feet of work space, total capacity will be around 4,500 employees working on the tech giant’s Amazon Web Services and Stores teams.
Amazon has big growth plans in Bellevue, where it has said it will employ 25,000 people across various buildings. The company currently has 12,000 workers in the city.
But work on Sonic and other projects stopped during Amazon’s pause on construction in the city east of Seattle, as Amazon aimed to get a better idea of what impact hybrid work would have on its need for office space. Roughly half of the building’s interior, about 450,000 square feet, was completed up to the 19th floor.
Other impacted buildings include Dynamo (West Main) Tower One, which opened in February and will be home to 1,500 employees; Bellevue 600, where the core of one tower is currently rising and another tower is paused; and The Artise, where construction is also paused.
A report by commercial real estate firm Broderick Group said that of the 5 million square feet of Amazon leased space in downtown Bellevue, there is approximately 1.6 million square feet “sitting in shell condition.”
During a tour of Sonic in November, Amazon stressed that it was testing a variety of layouts for collaborative work and communal gathering. Sonic features lounges, breakout spaces, meeting rooms, focus spaces, team suites, head-down spaces and more areas that Amazon said it would test and tweak to learn how people work post-pandemic.
“Bellevue provides more space for us to create good jobs and offers a business-friendly community with great amenities, a high quality of life, and a fantastic talent pool,” the company wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Amazon has around 50,000 employees in Seattle, down from a peak of about 60,000.
The company has been hit by a wave of corporate and tech layoffs over the past couple years. Amazon cut 27,000 jobs last year, and this week announced it was cutting hundreds of jobs across AWS’ Sales, Marketing, and Global Services organization, and a few hundred jobs on its Physical Stores Technology team.
Meanwhile, in nearby Kirkland, Wash., Google is reportedly pausing construction at its Kirkland Urban campus, where it planned to have four buildings totaling 760,000 square feet of space.
