Amazon has been hiring thousands of new employees each year, growing headcount by 40 percent a year. According to the Seattle Times, Amazon had 5,000 Seattle employees when it moved to downtown from a different neighborhood in 2010. As of August, it had more than 40,000 employees in the city. It occupies more than 13 million feet of office space, according to permit information pulled by BuildZoom, enough to fill five Empire State Buildings.

As Hacker Noon first discovered, the growth in Seattle since 2015 is visible from a camera atop the Space Needle. This time lapse video shows how extreme the growth has been.