Fairfax County’s list of its top 10 largest employers hasn't changed much in a decade. But the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, better known as Freddie Mac, has dropped a place for the first time in five years to make room for the company that is quickly becoming one of Northern Virginia’s dominant bosses, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).
The company is now a top-10 principal employer in Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington counties, according to fiscal year 2020 Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports recently issued by the trio.
It’s a big jump. Amazon didn’t make any of these lists last year. There were at least 7,000 Amazonians, and possibly more than 10,000, within the three jurisdictions during fiscal 2020, which ended in June.
Most of those workers are in Fairfax. Amazon became the seventh largest employer there with between 5,000 and 10,000 employees, per the CAFR. It is the fourth largest non-government employer, behind Inova Health System (No. 4), George Mason University (No. 5), and Booz-Allen Hamilton (No. 6).
That kind of jump doesn’t happen overnight, said Victor Hoskins, president and CEO of Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. Still, he expects Amazon to move up the list again next year.
“Given the rate that they are moving right now, and if you think of total jobs for all Amazon companies, they could easily be upwards of the fifth slot next year,” Hoskins said.
In Loudoun, Amazon was the ninth largest employer in fiscal 2020 with 1,000 to 2,500 workers. In Arlington, Amazon jumped to the No. 8 spot with at least 1,000 employees.
The expanding Amazon workforce is a product of multiple regional and national investments by the company. Everything from the Amazon Web Services hub near Dulles International Airport in Herndon, Amazon’s second headquarters in Arlington, the increase in data centers in Loudoun, and the sharp growth of its logistics network are part of this increase.
Amazon did not get into specifics about its hiring in these three counties. The company employs about "18,500 full- and part-time" employees in Virginia, "and we continue to hire," a spokeswoman for Amazon said.
It previously told the Washington Business Journal that it has more than 10,000 employees in Greater Washington. But that number has almost certainly increased this year, even as its offices have remained largely shuttered since the spring. We’ve tracked where most of these Amazon jobs are — across millions of square feet of warehouse, data centers and offices.
The Loudoun increase was largely attributed to decades-long investment in data centers and retail distributions centers, said Buddy Rizer, executive director of the county’s Department of Economic Development. Amazon, under various subsidiaries, has at least 2.5 million square feet of existing data centers in Northern Virginia and has another 5.6 million square feet in its pipeline planned for 245 acres in Loudoun and Fairfax. Amazon is also one of Loudoun's principal property taxpayers — No. 5 on the list, as it owns property with a total assessed value of $312.4 million.
Amazon made Arlington's employer list because of its ongoing stand-up of HQ2, which promises to have some 25,000 employees over the next decade, said Arlington's economic development office said in a statement. By the end of this year, Amazon should have about 1,600 employees at HQ2's leased Crystal City offices. In 2023, it expects to deliver its first two HQ2 towers in Pentagon City totaling 2.1 million square feet of office and retail, and it owns another 11.6 acres in Pentagon City for a larger second phase.
Sometimes lost in the talk of Amazon’s regional growth are the AWS offices near Dulles International Airport. AWS named Fairfax County the home of its East Coast hub roughly four years and said it would add some 1,500 new jobs. Amazon leased some 400,000 square feet at the time but added another 275,000 square feet in 2019.
Hoskins said that 2019 office space expansion was “extraordinary” considering what AWS locked in initially, but he said it also made sense because of how much cloud computing companies have invested in the region.
“You'll see that this has been a trend for a while that has accelerated over the last five years. All of the data center infrastructure opens the door for companies like AWS to operate," Hoskins said.
While cloud services is Amazon's income generator, e-commerce remains what it is best known for — and why it's hiring at such a massive clip as the pandemic drives more shoppers online. Amazon reported about $261 billion in sales for the first nine months of this year, about $67 billion more than during the same period last year. It has hired upward of 125,000 new employees to meet that demand, and 100,000 more for the holiday season.
It’s unclear how much of that hiring translates to Greater Washington. But we know Amazon has added several last-mile delivery stations ahead of the holiday season, bringing some 300 jobs to the Maryland side. It will also add two Prince William County warehouses in 2021 with some 300 jobs, and has several logistics centers in operation now in Loudoun and Fairfax..