In San Diego, Amazon plans to lease an additional 40,000 square feet of office space, allowing for the creation of 200 new jobs. Those new roles will join the 90,000 Amazon employees already working in California. Since 2010, Amazon has invested more than $50 billion in the Golden State. Amazon’s San Diego plans include the addition of more than 40,000 square feet of office space that will allow for the creation of 200 new jobs, though the company has not specified the location of the new space.
CoStar managing analyst Joshua Ohl said a likely location is the Campus Pointe office complex in the city’s University Town Center neighborhood. It’s the same campus where Amazon established its first San Diego office presence in 2017, taking more than 100,000 square feet, after years of operating fulfillment centers in the region.
CoStar data shows landlord real estate investment trust Alexandria Real Estate Equities in June leased 44,806 square feet to an undisclosed tenant at Campus Pointe, located at 10300 Campus Point Drive. Alexandria and its local brokers, as well as brokers who represented the tenant, declined to comment on the tenant’s identity.
A new San Diego space would mark Amazon’s first office lease in the area since 2017. “But since they’re targeting San Diego as one of six expansion hubs in the country, I would imagine that we will see Amazon increase its office footprint here in the coming years, while also continuing to expand its distribution footprint across the region,” Ohl said.
San Diego has been growing in attractiveness with tech firms, as it offers the coastal California lifestyle for about half the cost of office space in San Francisco and the prime West Coast office market of Los Angeles, according to CoStar. It also offers a deep pool of new talent from several acclaimed universities including the University of California, San Diego, and from the area’s booming life sciences industry, which is among the nation’s largest.
Major tech firms including iPhone maker Apple have been expanding in the San Diego region, which has been working to capture spillover demand for years from tech and media companies in Los Angeles just a few hours’ drive away.
Amazon in the past year has been accelerating the buildout of its San Diego distribution infrastructure, leasing 3.4 million square feet of industrial space in four locations throughout the region.
“People from all walks of life come to Amazon to develop their career — from recent graduates looking for a place to turn their ideas into high-impact products, to veterans accessing new jobs in cloud computing thanks to our upskilling programs,” Beth Galetti, Amazon senior vice president of human resources, said in a statement. “These 3,500 new jobs will be in cities across the country with strong and diverse talent pools. We look forward to helping these communities grow their emerging tech workforce.”
Teams in the six cities will support various businesses across Amazon, including Amazon Web Services, Alexa, Amazon Advertising, Amazon Fashion, OpsTech and Amazon Fresh. The company expects to hire for a variety of roles, from cloud infrastructure architects to software engineers to data scientists to product managers to user experience designers.
In addition to those plans, the company said it is hiring for nearly 20,000 positions in the United States to fill roles across tech, corporate and customer fulfillment.
Since 2010, Amazon said it has directly created more than 600,000 jobs in the United States and invested more than $350 billion across more than 40 states, including infrastructure and compensation. “We estimate that Amazon’s direct investments have contributed an additional $315 billion to the U.S. economy over the last decade and supported more than 780,000 jobs on top of the company’s direct hires in industries like construction, logistics or professional services,” the company said in a statement.