SEATTLE — Amazon plans to turn its Vancouver, B.C., outpost into one of the retail giant’s largest research and development centers.
The Seattle company on Monday announced its second expansion in Vancouver in six months, disclosing plans to occupy a third of a massive new downtown redevelopment of a former post office building.
When that development opens in 2022, Amazon says, it will have space in the city for 5,000 workers, which would cement the retailer’s place among the province’s largest employers. Amazon currently employs more than 1,000 people in Vancouver.
The announcement is the latest in a handful of major satellite office expansions Amazon has announced, even as executives are still deciding in which region, among 20 finalists, the company will place its second headquarters campus. Vancouver applied, but was not among the finalists for the project, which Amazon says it hopes to staff with 50,000 people.
Amazon’s expansion is another vote of confidence in Vancouver’s growing technology scene, which has been bolstered by Canada’s relatively open guest-worker laws and its proximity to technology giants in the San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Seattle.
On Tuesday, the internet behemoth unveiled plans for a major expansion in Boston’s Seaport District, promising 2,000 new technology jobs even as the city remains in contention for the company’s coveted second headquarters.
Amazon announced it would move into a 430,000-square-foot “Tech Hub” in 2021, and said the new jobs would be created in fields including machine learning, speech science, cloud computing and robotics.
The company currently has about 1,200 workers in the city, according to Rohit Prasad, a Boston-based vice president and head scientist of Amazon Alexa. In 2016, the company opened a fulfillment center in Fall River, Mass., that employs more than 1,000 workers.
