Amazon will expand its Boston tech hub with 2,000 new jobs
Video: Amazon to roll out memory feature for Alexa
Amazon is still narrowing down candidates for its highly coveted second headquarters, but it's picked the city of Boston for an expanded tech hub to support its machine learning, cloud computing, and robotics efforts.
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Amazon's new Tech Hub in Boston's Seaport will create 2,000 tech jobs in the city.
The tech giant announced Tuesday that it's doubling its technology workforce in Boston, with an estimated 2,000 new hires and expanding into 430,000-square feet in WS Development's Seaport project, a massive development on the Boston waterfront.
The new facility is slated to open in 2021 and will house teams focused on Alexa, Amazon Web Services, and Audible. Amazon noted that its Boston-based machine learning scientists and engineers have played a key role in building Alexa's conversational AI through cutting-edge research and developments in machine learning.
"Amazon is excited to create 2,000 more jobs in Greater Boston," Rohit Prasad, a Boston-based vice president and head scientist of Alexa, said in a statement. "In just a few years, we've grown from a handful of software developers and scientists to a team of more than 1,200, inventing new capabilities and products on behalf of millions of customers around the world."
Boston is on the short list of candidate cities vying for Amazon's HQ2, but it seems unlikely that it'll land the winning bid with such a significant expansion project now underway.
Amazon said previously that plans to invest more than $5 billion in the construction of HQ2, creating up to 50,000 high-paying jobs for locals. The company said that HQ2 will be "a full equal to our current campus," and spur "tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community."
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