Tech giant Amazon has chosen Houston as the home of its newest North American Tech Hub.
Amazon officially opened the doors of the new 25,000-square-foot hub in CityCentre on July 26. The company expects to hire a team of roughly 150 Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees to work at the site.
"We're looking forward to becoming a bigger part of the Houston community," said Kris Satterthwaite, Gulf Coast enterprise sales leader of AWS. "Houston is a fantastic place to live and work, and has a strong local economy that we look forward to investing in and growing together."
"The expansion of Amazon's Houston workforce is indicative of a larger trend we are seeing of the major cloud players opting to locate their teams closer to their customers here in Houston," said Susan Davenport, Senior Vice President of Economic Development for the Greater Houston Partnership. "Our energy, life sciences and manufacturing sectors are data-intensive, and this move makes a lot of sense. This is not the first, and I doubt it will be the last. A great portion of the digital tech industry's activity to this point has been focused on business-to-consumer, and is now shifting to business-to-business. Houston is largely a B2B city, so we stand to gain from this trend."
Amazon has invested $10 billion in Texas since 2010, according to a release from the company.
With more than 223,000 tech workers, Houston has the 12th largest tech sector in the U.S., according to the Computing Technology Industry Association. The region is home to more than 8,200 tech-related firms, including more than 500 tech startups.
"We have worked for the last couple of years to accelerate the growth of Houston's digital tech ecosystem, and we've got quite a bit of momentum with The Ion, TMC3, The Cannon, and so many others," Davenport said. "The opening of Amazon's tech hub is another indicator of Houston's growing presence as an innovation-focused city."
Learn more about Houston's digital tech sector.
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