Amazon just signed a lease for 335k square feet of office space in New York less than a year after abandoning its widely publicized plans to build its HQ2 there. In those previous plans, the city had promised Amazon almost $3B in tax benefits and other perks like a helipad for Jeffy Boy.
But now Amazon has decided to come to New York without any perks at all — proving that the city’s ostentatious overtures were always unnecessary.
Amazon will open a new office in the city’s growing (and not not controversial) Hudson Yards development.
Nothing at all — Amazon was basically bluffing all along.
After all, New York still has the benefits of a huge pool of highly educated workers — and that’s enough to attract Amazon even without steep discounts.
Other West Coast tech giants have also been beefing up their physical footprints in New York.
Facebook recently signed a lease for 1.5m sq. ft. of office space in Hudson Yards (just a few blocks away from Amazon’s new digs), and Google signed a lease earlier this year for 1.3m sq. ft. over in the Hudson Square neighborhood.