The announcement shows how Amazon, like other big tech companies, has been thriving in the economic chaos of the pandemic. When customers consumed and shopped online, Amazon posted record sales and profits in the last four years. It sold 57 percent more products than a year earlier, doubling profits to $ 5.2 billion.
In recent years, the rapid growth of technology companies, both those of the West Coast and local start-ups, has transformed a broad track of Manhattan into a vibrant tech hub. The biggest companies – Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google – have all expanded their footprints in the city, cementing New York City as a global tech corridor.
The companies settled for the most part on the Far West Side, stretching along West 34th Street to the Hudson River and down to the Chelsea district. Collectively, they employ about 20,000 people in the city, and Google’s campus there is its largest word outside its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Just this year, Facebook hired more than a thousand people in New York City, bringing the total there to more than 4,000. It plans to rent thousands more for new offices it recently rented in the Farley Building near Penn Station and down the street at Hudson Yards, the mini-city on the Hudson River that is the largest private development of the country is.
Amazon backed out plans last year to build a second headquarters in New York, following fierce criticism from some lawmakers and residents. When the company made that sudden change, executives said they would take the 25,000 jobs it had planned in Queens and spread it across smaller tech hubs, including thousands of jobs in New York. It continues with plans to build a second headquarters, known as HQ2, in the Washington area, where it expects 25,000 people to work.
