Amazon resumes Bellevue tower build, as Seattle workforce shrinks

Amazon is restarting construction on a Bellevue office tower, as its Eastside workforce continues to grow and its presence in Seattle shrinks. 

The company announced Thursday it had resumed construction on Sonic — a 42-story building that will accommodate more than 4,500 employees when complete.

Amazon opened the first 20 floors of the building to employees in September but construction on the remaining space has been on hold since July 2022, part of a temporary halt on some future construction for its Bellevue campus. That pause remains in place for other Bellevue buildings, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed this week.

Amazon expects construction for the next 22 floors of Sonic to be completed before the end of the year.

The new building continues to tip the scales of how Amazon’s workforce is spread across the Puget Sound region. Though Amazon’s Seattle campus is still the company’s largest corporate presence by far, its workforce in the city has shrunk by 5,000 employees in the last year.

Amazon said it had 55,000 employees in 2022 and 2023. That number dropped to 50,000 this year.

Meanwhile, its Bellevue campus has grown to now include 12,000 employees, up from nearly 10,000 in 2022. 

Amazon says it plans to have 25,000 employees based in Bellevue in the coming years — an adage it has stuck to since 2020, when it outlined plans for a campus large enough to accommodate that many workers. 

Amazon has maintained for the last few years that its future growth will occur in Bellevue, rather than Seattle. A spokesperson said this week Bellevue provides Amazon with more space, a business-friendly community and a fantastic talent pool.

“Our footprint in Washington is much bigger than just our corporate jobs in Seattle,” Guy Palumbo, Amazon’s director of public policy for HQ1, told The Seattle Times in 2022, when Amazon’s Bellevue campus was poised to reach 10,000 workers. The Eastside “is going to be where the majority of our growth is in the future,” he added.

The Seattle downsize is partly due to Amazon transferring some workers from Seattle to Bellevue, but it is also a result of widespread layoffs that have continued from late 2022 through this year. On Wednesday, Amazon announced yet another round of cuts, adding several hundred more layoffs to the 27,000 cuts it had previously announced last year. 

Amazon does not break down the impact of job cuts by region, so it’s not clear how many layoffs hit Seattle and Bellevue. In January 2023, Amazon filed a notice with the state’s Employment Security Department that it had laid off 2,300 people between the two campuses, but it has not filed a similar notice since. 

Once fully complete, the Bellevue campus will include several buildings clustered in downtown Bellevue. Though it paused construction on some projects, Amazon opened the first part of its Sonic office tower in September last year and another office building, Dynamo, in February. Dynamo, part of three towers called West Main, will accommodate 1,500 employees.