Amazon Web Services Moving to Fairfax County

Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to set up an office in Herndon, adding 500 information technology jobs to local Fairfax County economy, officials announced Wednesday.

The company, which provides cloud-computing services to businesses, government and educational organizations, will be able to expand thanks to a $500,000 grant from the Governor’s Opportunity Fund approved by Gov. Bob McDonnell.

“Amazon Web Services is a global, universally known company that has a significant Virginia presence as a strong corporate partner and employer,” McDonnell said in a statement following the announcement. “Adding a new office in Fairfax County allows the company close proximity to its IT and government customers in Virginia, and creates 500 highly-technical jobs.”

The Virginia Department of Business Assistance will assist AWS with funding and support to help recruit and train new employees through its Virginia Jobs Investment Program.

Virginia officials were able to lock down the new business with the help of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority.

“Fairfax County is proud to be home to such a world-class company,” said Gerald Gordon, president and CEO of the FCEDA. “The company will benefit from the highly skilled IT workforce that is attracted to the Fairfax area and the quality of life. It is a very important part of our corporate roster.”

The FCEDA to Fairfax County during the first quarter of 2013. But sequestration helped keep the number lower than the 2,000 jobs the FCEDA helped bring during the same period in 2012.

AWS provides more than 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan and more.

AWS will join the ranks of a long list of info technology companies that helped Virginia become the third-ranked state for innovation and entrepreneurship, according to a new report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In April, Virginia’s jobless rate dropped to 5.2 percent, the lowest it’s been since 2008.