Dive Brief:

• Amazon announced in a press release on Monday that it plans to expand its Chicago tech hub and hire 400 new tech employees for roles in cloud computing, advertising and business development. To fill these roles, the retailer is hosting a career day event today.

• The retailer's new tech hub will expand Amazon's presence in downtown Chicago into a space that will span more than 70,000 square feet, which will make way for the company to double its local tech workforce. According to the company, Amazon has already created more than 11,000 full-time jobs and invested more than $4.4 billion in Illinois since 2010.

• Amazon also noted that Chicago staffers currently support and create products and services for Amazon Web Services, Amazon Advertising as well as the company's transportation and operations units.

Dive Insight:

As Amazon expands its presence in the Windy City, other retailers are creating their own tech hubs and innovation centers to bolster retail operations.

Yoox Net-a-Porter Group did so in London in 2017 and Lowe's announced a tech hub in Charlotte in 2019. Of course, neither of those moves caused as much of a stir as Amazon did during its search for a second headquarters.

The company appears to want to draw from Chicago's local tech talent; the city also supplies workers for other major tech firms and retailers such as Salesforce, Google and Walgreens. The city is also one of the few locations the retailer has selected for its Amazon Go stores.