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Amazon delivers newest Tech Hub to Houston and plans to hire
A year and a half after Houston was left off the list of 20 cities Amazon was pursuing for its second United States headquarters, the tech giant chose the Bayou City to house its 18th North American Tech Hub.
Amazon opened the doors of the hub on Friday, July 26, in 25,000 square feet of space in CityCentre, and the company has plans to hire to round out its team of 150 Amazon Web Services employees to work out of the hub.
"We're looking forward to becoming a bigger part of the Houston community," says Kris Satterthwaite, Gulf Coast enterprise sales leader of AWS, in a release. "Houston is a fantastic place to live and work, and has a strong local economy that we look forward to investing in and growing together."
The city of Houston, along with the Greater Houston Partnership, has worked to make Houston appealing to big business and tech giants, says Susan Davenport, senior vice president of economic development at the GHP.
"The expansion of Amazon's Houston workforce is indicative of a larger trend we are seeing of the major cloud players opting to locate their teams closer to their customers here in Houston," Davenport says in an email to InnovationMap. "Our energy, life sciences and manufacturing sectors are data-intensive, and this move makes a lot of sense. This is not the first, and I doubt it will be the last. A great portion of the digital tech industry's activity to this point has been focused on business-to-consumer, and is now shifting to business-to-business. Houston is largely a B2B city, so we stand to gain from this trend."
The Tech Hubs in North America have more than 20,000 employees. About 1,000 of them are from Amazon's Austin Tech Hub, which opened around four years ago and was recently announced to be in the process of expanding to include another 800 employees, per the Wall Street Journal.
The company has invested $10 billion into Texas since 2010, according to the release, and Houston's diversity, universities, and quality of life were attractive to Amazon.
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