Amazon’s Cambridge Office Confirmed, with Room for More Than 600

Amazon’s footprint in the Boston area is even bigger than we thought.

The Seattle-based e-commerce and Web services pioneer is leasing more than 129,000 square feet in Cambridge, according to real estate documents filed with local officials. That’s room for more than 600 people, if you use the standard commercial real estate estimate of roughly 200 square feet per employee.

It’s no secret that Amazon was coming to the Boston area in a major way. In December, the company signed a deal with Gov. Deval Patrick, agreeing to collect sales tax on Massachusetts-based purchases if state officials would help the company push for its dream of a federal Internet sales tax system. The agreement followed Amazon’s $775 million purchase of Kiva Systems, a Massachusetts company that makes warehouse robots.

And after signing the deal with Patrick, Amazon said it would hire for “hundreds of high tech jobs in Massachusetts.” Shortly thereafter, The Boston Globe reported that Amazon’s engineering office at 101 Main Street in Cambridge would be about 105,000 square feet.

Now, based on this lease document, it looks like Amazon wanted even more space. The lease breaks the footprint into three chunks, spread between the fifth through ninth floors, and floor 11. The lease terms are for about 10 years. There’s no indication of the price in this document.

It’s a small detail, but a telling one. Amazon’s job growth has been astounding in the past few years—check out the graphs compiled by GeekWire—as it builds out a huge campus that could make it the largest single employer in Seattle proper. It looks like that appetite will expand to the Boston area, too.

As we’ve previously reported, Amazon’s plans in the Boston area include cloud-computing and digital products engineering jobs, including a speech-recognition team that will compete with Microsoft and Apple for talent.

Here’s the lease:

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.