Though the Boston Globe initially reported the move last December, the company has now made it official: Seattle-based e-commerce company Amazon.com will launch its Boston engineering office by the end of the summer.
By “no later than September 28, 2013,” according to the official real estate lease, Amazon will occupy its new Kendall Square location at 101 Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The lease further specifies that the rental space is over 129,000 square feet (large enough to fit approximately 600 people), and that Amazon plans to lease the space for ten years and four months in total.
Since the Globe’s initial report, several incentives for Amazon launching a Boston office have come to light. Xconomy reports that Amazon signed a deal back in December to collect sales tax from Massachusetts-based buyers provided that state officials would aid the company’s lobby for a federal Internet sales tax system. Furthermore, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems this past March, a North Reading based company specializing in robot-automated order fulfillment systems.
With the announcement, Amazon becomes the latest major tech company to establish itself in the Boston area. The increasingly popular Cambridge Innovation Center is now home to many of the nation’s top technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, and even, in a mysteriously downplayed fashion, Apple.
