Post updated with comments from Oracle

Oracle is significantly boosting its presence in Amazon’s backyard with a new lease in a downtown Seattle office tower, amid a broader move by the database technology company to expand its growing cloud business.

The company said it is leasing 176,000 square feet across multiple floors of the Russell Investments Center, best known as the home of Seattle real estate company Zillow. In addition, Oracle is adding another 10,000 square feet of office space at the Century Square building, where its office is located today.

The company said the move to the new space will happen over a two-year period. Oracle is in the midst of a significant hiring push in Seattle and it is investing heavily in its local presence.

The new leases bring Oracle to approximately 300,000 square of office space in Seattle, the company said. That would represent room for somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people, using standard metrics for space per employee.

In August, Oracle announced plans to hire 5,000 more than new engineers, consultants, sales and support people for its rapidly growing cloud business. That is in addition to the more than 2,650 cloud sales professionals and 1,500 cloud developers Oracle had hired at that point for the year in the United States.

Oracle is one of more than 100 tech companies to open offices in Seattle to take advantage of the region’s wealth of tech talent. Oracle first came to Seattle in 2014, with an office at the Century Square building, where it later expanded. With its rapidly growing cloud push, the company has again run out of space and is need of expansion.

Oracle has quite a legacy as an enterprise computing company but it has found itself an underdog in the modern cloud computing era. It does not register in the cloud infrastructure market that Amazon Web Services dominates, as judged by Gartner, and despite the insistence of mercurial Oracle founder Larry Ellison that his company will compete in infrastructure computing, that has yet to happen.

The story is a little different for Oracle when it comes to cloud software services, where it still enjoys a prominent position among database customers as well as companies looking for enterprise-resource planning software. And it has shown some strength in delivering cloud application development resources (known as platform-as-a-service) to software development teams.