E-commerce giant Amazon is boosting its footprint in San Diego -- leasing office space in University City with room for more than 500 employees.

The Seattle-based online retailer confirmed this week that it has signed a lease in the Campus Pointe office park from Alexandria Real Estate Equities, said Sam Kennedy, corporate communications manager at Amazon, in an email response to questions.

Amazon is taking nearly 107,000 square feet at 10300 Campus Point Drive. While Amazon has a small office in Solana Beach, as well as distribution facilities in the region, this is its first major office/engineering presence in the county.

The deal is among the largest expansions of an outside, well-known, tech giant into San Diego – exceeding the 60,000 square feet that Google leased last year for a satellite office.


RELATED: San Diego to bid for Amazon’s HQ2 second headquarters location

Google’s decision to set up shop in San Diego was linked in part to its acquisitions of local start-ups, including sensor developer Lumedyne Technologies. Amazon is planting roots without an acquisition.

“Is this part of a larger trend? I think it could be,” said Kevin Carroll, head of Tech San Diego, a software industry trade group. “UC San Diego graduates 10,000 students a year. If you are Google or Amazon, you’re looking at that and saying there is going to be a good local pipeline of talent.”

Amazon didn’t respond to questions about the type of workers it plans to hire in San Diego. On its website, the company lists 49 local job openings in game development, software engineering and machine learning/data science, among other fields.


Late last year, Amazon hired long-time San Diego video game executive John Smedley, who developed the EverQuest multiplayer franchise for Sony Online Entertainment, to head a new game studio. About 15 of the job openings locally involve gaming.

A larger number, about 25 openings, are related to data science, software development and security.

“They feel that they can grow and find the talent here,” said Mark Cafferty, head of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. “The availability of people from the universities is attractive, and we have technology clusters in cyber, big data and biotechnology -- which attracts a lot of people who work in data and analytics – that show there is also seasoned talent” in the region.

Amazon has been on a hiring binge lately, adding about 30,000 workers in the last quarter alone. It now employs 382,400 worldwide.


Last week, Amazon took the unusual step of publicly seeking requests for proposals for HQ2 – a second headquarters location that could eventually employ 50,000 workers. Dozens of cities nationwide are expected to submit bids by the Oct. 19 deadline.

San Diego will be among the bidders, with officials planning to emphasize the region’s strengths in technology workforce and quality of life to overcome weaknesses such as high housing costs and limited government incentives.

Amazon’s decision to establish a beachhead in Campus Pointe “squarely backs up the argument that we’ll be making in our bid that San Diego is one of the only cities where you can access both the lifestyle and talented workforce that companies want and need,” said Matt Awbrey, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Kevin Faulconer. “You can have it all here.”

Alexandria’s Campus Pointe project – currently about 750,000 square feet – includes former Qualcomm buildings that Pasadena-based Real Estate Investment Trust acquired and extensively remodeled – piling on perks aimed at attracting today’s tech savvy workers.


Those amenities include Green Acre, an on-site restaurant headed by celebrity chef Brian Malarkey that includes a 3.5-acre organic garden to provide fresh produce; meeting/conference facilities; walking/jogging trails; an on-site fitness center and a soccer field.

“These days, you have an ever-growing millennial population,” said Daniel Ryan, executive vice president of Alexandria. “To attract the best tenants, you need to have real estate with great design and amenities.”

Ryan declined to discuss Amazon, citing confidentiality agreements. Last year, Alexandria redeveloped a 304,000-square-foot building at 10290 Campus Point Drive. Eli Lilly & Co. leased the entire building, vacating space that it previously occupied at nearby 10300 Campus Point Drive.

Other tenants in Campus Pointe include Celgene Corp., UC San Diego Medical Center and Covance Inc. Earlier this week, the city council gave land-use approval for a new 10,000-square-foot brewery/restaurant and 320,000-square-foot office building on the site.


New York-based pension fund TIAA Global Asset Management is a financial partner with Alexandria in the Campus Pointe project.

U-T staff writer Jennifer Van Grove contributed to this report.


Business

mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com;

Twitter:@TechDiego


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