The company is already headquartered in the Pacific Northwest city and is now apparently aiming to expand its stock of several million square feet of office space and its American workforce.
An uncertain economy has not prevented Amazon from continuing its business growth in recent years, but it has left the offices at 1918 Eighth Avenue in Seattle lying largely unused. The suspicions among those close to the local office market are that the retail giant will soon occupy at least 15 of the 36 floors at the site.
Having been completed in 2009, the building’s owner, Schnitzer West, has had trouble renting the resulting offices, with less than a sixth of the available space currently under lease. Some analysts predict that Amazon will take over more than 15 floors of the building in the next few months.
Neither Amazon nor Schnitzer West has been keen to discuss the prospect of a large-scale leasehold deal, but there has been plenty of speculation about what such a move might mean for Seattle’s office market.
Peter Truex from Collier’s International told the Seattle Times, “Amazon has become a key driver, and a market-maker, in the downtown office marketplace.”
“It would be an indicator to other tenants who may be sitting on the sideline that it’s time to get serious,” he added.
Seattle is in Washington State on America’s Pacific coast; meanwhile, the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, was recently reported by NAI Global to have the strongest office space market in the US at the end of last year.
Editor’s notes: In March 2011, Amazon signed a lease for 460,000 square feet of office space at 1918 Eighth Avenue, which accounted for two-thirds of the building. The signing of the lease took the building to 94 per cent occupancy, and shortly after the deal, in May 2011, Schnitzer put the commercial property up for sale.
An affiliate of JPMorgan Chase then purchased it for $350 million.
As of May 2023, Amazon’s corporate headquarters and the Original South Lake Union Campus were listed as 410 Terry Avenue, North Seattle. The 1.7 million-square-foot campus had been owned by the company since 2007.
The corporation occupies several properties throughout Seattle.
As of June 2026, Amazon’s original headquarters remains at the Day 1 building in downtown Seattle, and its workspaces offer views of Puget Sound, Lake Union.
However, in June 2023, Amazon opened a second headquarters, also known as Amazon HQ2 in Metropolitan Park, in Arlington, Virginia.