Total employment at HQ2 has increased slightly since 2024, despite multiple rounds of corporate layoffs at Amazon in recent months.
Around 8,500 employees currently work out of Amazon’s headquarters in Pentagon City, the company announced in a blog post this afternoon. That’s a modest increase from 8,330 employees reported at the end of 2024.
Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide economic development policy, told ARLnow that around 84% of the positions at HQ2 are qualifying jobs under the company’s memorandum of understanding with Virginia.
“Our second headquarters has always been a long-term investment, and we are still in the early years of our investment,” Sullivan said. “We’re proud of our $2.53 billion investment, the jobs we’ve created and the progress we’ve made.”
Amazon currently advertises about 500 open jobs in Arlington and continues to target 25,000 new jobs by 2038, according to the HQ2 website. This is despite the company reducing its corporate workforce by about 14,000 positions in October, followed by another 16,000 layoffs in January.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned employees last summer that the company expected to pare down its white-collar workforce in response to ongoing advances in AI. Recent job cuts were also framed as “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”
Today’s blog post made no mention of plans to construct the long-awaited second phase of Amazon’s headquarters, a futuristic spiral structure towering over the intersection of S. Eads Street and 12th Street S., known as the PenPlace site. Given the number of open desks at the company’s Metropolitan Park location, construction plans have been on pause since 2023.
Last June, the Arlington County Board granted Amazon a three-year extension on the project.
Instead, the blog post highlighted other investments in Arlington and Virginia as HQ2 approaches its third anniversary. These include $1.3 billion in affordable housing investments throughout the D.C. area — creating and preserving over 10,000 affordable housing units — and donating more than $60 million to community partners over the last year.
This is in addition to the planned opening of Arlington Community High School at HQ2 in the fall, in what is expected to be the permanent home for the alternative high school.
“Virginia is a great state to do business,” the post says. “Across the Commonwealth, we continue to invest in our corporate office in Herndon, our fulfillment network including the launch of ORF4 — our robotics fulfillment center in Virginia Beach, and in AI and cloud infrastructure that powers businesses statewide.”
More information from the post is below.
Met Park brings jobs, small businesses, and community programming
Since opening Met Park in May 2023, nearly 8,500 Amazon employees now work at our second headquarters. The campus includes 50,000 square feet of retail space for 13 local small businesses and a 2.5-acre public park that has hosted hundreds of community events – from affordable housing summits to farmers markets, live music, and art programming with MoCA Arlington’s Innovation Studio – reaching an estimated 133,000 community members. Since implementing our 5-day return-to-office policy in January 2025, we’ve continued to see positive economic impacts in the National Landing community, including foot traffic averaged more than 155,000 monthly visitors at Met Park.
$1.3 billion investment in affordable housing
Our commitment extends far beyond job creation. Through Amazon’s housing fund, we’ve invested $1.3 billion to preserve and create over 10,000 affordable housing units across the National Capital Region. In February, we broke ground on the Victory Center in Alexandria – transforming a long-vacant office building into 377 all-affordable homes. We’ve also donated more than $60 million to 230+ local community partners in the last 12 months.
Building Virginia’s talent pipeline
We’re building Virginia’s talent pipeline from the ground up, investing more than $5.7 million in CodeVA to expand computer science education and awarding $920,000 in Amazon Future Engineer Scholarships to Virginia students. Over 5,000 Amazon operations employees in Virginia have participated in Career Choice, our pre-paid tuition program
