Report: Amazon leases 335K square feet of office space in NYC without any tax incentives, less than a year after pulling out of its larger HQ2 campus deal
Amazon is renting new office space in the Hudson Yards neighborhood. Max Touhey — The e-commerce titan remains interested in the Big Apple
Curbed NYCaroline Spivack
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's Hudson Yards lease closes a loop that opened in early 2019, when political and community opposition drove executives into internal discussions to explore alternatives to HQ2, ending with Amazon walking away from its subsidized Long Island City campus. The new 335K-square-foot deal differs on the key variable: no tax incentives.
It also confirms a pattern flagged in July, when reporting showed that despite the HQ2 retreat, tech giants including Google, Facebook, and Amazon itself were still seeking to rent millions of square feet in New York. The company never stopped wanting the market — it stopped wanting to pay for it publicly.
First-order effects
Amazon gains an immediate NYC hiring and engineering footprint in Hudson Yards without committing to a flagship campus or negotiating a subsidy package with state and city officials.
New York keeps the jobs it fought over in 2018–19, but now collects no negotiated incentive obligations from Amazon in exchange — the leverage that came with HQ2 is gone.
Second-order effects
The 'no tax incentives' framing hands ammunition to opponents of megadeal subsidies everywhere: if Amazon will lease in its most contested market unsubsidized, other cities' officials face harder cases for offering multi-billion-dollar packages to land it.
Competitors like Google and Facebook, already expanding NYC footprints per the July reporting, face a deeper local talent pool war as Amazon rebuilds headcount in Manhattan rather than Queens.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, big-tech expansion shifts from negotiated, headline campuses toward ordinary commercial leasing, weakening the incentive-auction model cities used during the HQ2 era — a shift regulators and local officials would have to absorb case by case.
For Amazon, distributed office leases reduce single-site political risk: the opposition campaign that killed HQ2 targeted one visible mega-project, while scattered leases are harder to organize against.
The trend: Tech companies are decoupling New York expansion from public subsidy deals, trading flagship campuses for plain commercial leases after the HQ2 backlash made incentive packages a liability.
Won't you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway - *without* requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways. Maybe the Trump admin should focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families. h…
It's 1500 jobs not 35000. It's leasing an office, not building a campus. This is a regional office, like Amazon has in many US cities, not a second headquarters. The gloating (but wrongheaded) amour-propre of the New Yorker... https://twitter.com/...
Amazon is coming to New York, just as they always planned. Fortunately, we dodged a $3 billion bullet by not agreeing to their subsidy shakedown https://www.nytimes.com/...
Long #NYC as Amazon, FB, Google, etc grow big time, and startups awaiting their growth spurts celebrate. “It's clear the main reason Amazon wanted to be here was the availability of a skilled tech workforce plus the synergy with related industries” https://www.wsj.com/...
HQ2 was not a contest but a con. It was going to be NYC or DC from the beginning. Where else would a 55yo recently divorced man want to hang? NYC didn't need to subsidize the third-richest company in the US paying little to no taxes. Bravo @SenGianaris https://www.wsj.com/...
Here we go again with the misleading Amazon bashing. The Hudson Yards space is for 1500 people. Versus the 25,000 jobs that were pledged in HQ2. https://twitter.com/...
Amazon agrees to lease 335,000 square feet in NYC's Hudson Yards neighborhood, in a deal without any financial incentives from the city or state. via @KeikoMorris - https://www.wsj.com/...
Almost like corporate tax subsidies that are pitched as necessities.... aren't, and politicians should stop getting played https://www.techmeme.com/...