Amazon is planning to let its lease lapse next year at an 87,000-square-foot building containing 79,000 square feet of office space and 7,300 square feet of retail at 428 Westlake Ave. N. in South Lake Union, according to a July report from Cushman & Wakefield. The move would add yet another vacant tower to a Seattle office market already grappling with the highest vacancy rate among major U.S. metro cores.
A Lease Signed in 2016, Now on the Way Out
Amazon signed its lease at the six-story building in 2016 and leased five office floors there, according to The Seattle Times. The current lease runs through 2027 and includes two five-year renewal options, but Cushman & Wakefield’s July report indicates Amazon does not intend to use them. The building’s ownership history underscores just how much the market has shifted: Alexandria Real Estate Equities bought the tower in October 2024 for $47.6 million, a nearly 42% discount from the $81.5 million Amazon-anchored building had sold for in 2017, according to Connect CRE. Vulcan Real Estate originally developed the 87,000-square-foot property as Tommy Bahama’s headquarters before Amazon leased five floors there in 2016.
The pending departure fits a pattern the Seattle Times report lays out in detail. Amazon vacated a 180,000-square-foot office building at 2201 Westlake Ave. in 2020, and in 2023 the company confirmed it was vacating several towers in Denny Triangle even as it renewed another lease and expanded to occupy the entire Denny Triangle tower there. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the 428 Westlake plans, the paper’s reporting notes.
A Multi-Year Contraction Across Seattle
The 428 Westlake exit is the latest data point in a broader retreat. Amazon has relinquished more than 1 million square feet of office space in Seattle since 2020, including nearly 595,000 square feet shed between 2024 and early 2026, according to KIRO 7. That contraction has continued into this year: Amazon confirmed in February that it would not renew its lease at 1915 Terry Ave. in Denny Triangle, a 251,000-square-foot building owned by Seattle Children’s that Amazon had occupied internally as “Kumo” since 2014, per GeekWire.
Amazon also left three-quarters of the 539,000-square-foot West8 tower at 2001 8th Ave. in Denny Triangle, space that General Motors has since announced it will move into, while Databricks has leased several floors in the same building. The company’s Seattle headcount has fallen sharply too, from roughly 60,000 employees in 2020 to fewer than 50,000 recently, with more than 7,200 local employees affected by layoffs since 2022 across two major waves of cuts. State employment notices tracked additional rounds of reductions, including 2,303 Washington positions eliminated in October 2025 and 2,198 more cut in February 2026, according to prior Hoodline reporting.
The Eastside Keeps Absorbing What Seattle Loses
While Amazon pulls back downtown, its Bellevue presence keeps growing. The company’s Bellevue head count rose from 11,000 in 2023 to roughly 14,300 in 2024, part of a formal goal Amazon set in 2020 to eventually house 25,000 employees on the Eastside after opening its first Bellevue office in 2017 with about 450 workers, according to Amazon. Amazon paused construction on several Bellevue towers in 2022, though downtown Bellevue itself is about 25% empty. The Artise, a Bellevue tower where Amazon is a long-term tenant, secured a $525 million refinancing, as Hoodline previously reported in its piece on the Artise tower bet…