Amazon leases 3,000sq.m. office in Haifa

Amazon has leased a 3,000-square meter building in the MATAM hi-tech park at the southern entrance to Haifa and will be hiring 200 software engineers in the coming few weeks.

Sources close to the deal say the premises will provide temporary accommodation for Amazon until a 12,000-sq.m. building that the company has leased will be completed next year.

Last July, it was reported that Amazon had leased the 12,000sq.m. building in Haifa as well as 25,000-sq.m. of office space in the Sarona Azrieli tower in Tel Aviv. Internal construction of the office space is not yet complete. All this real estate activity puts into solid perspective Amazon’s planned expansion of operations in Israel, both in terms of hi-tech R&D development and taking advantage of the country’s hi-tech knowhow and e-commerce activities on the Israeli market.

Amazon has also been seeking a logistics center over the past six months and representatives who visited Israel to locate such a center also met with Israel’s major food and retail companies. Amazon also advertised earlier this month for English to Hebrew translators for its Luxembourg office, clearly suggesting an expansion of its e-commerce operations in Israel.

Amazon plans beginning Israeli e-commerce operations with books, clothes and textiles and food at a later stage, sources say.

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) has been operating in Israel since 2012 when it opened a 3,000-sq.m. development center in Herzliya. In 2015, Amazon acquired Israeli chipmaker Annapurna labs for $350 million and also opened a 5,000-sq.m. development center in Haifa’s MATAM hi-tech park where it has 300 employees. The company’s employees are working on a range of development projects including delivery drones. (Globes/TNS)