Amazon.com Inc. announced today that it will expand its offices in six cities across the U.S., a move not in line with many tech companies’ decision to have staff work from home indefinitely or at least for a few years.

The company said that it will invest $1.4 billion to bolster its office workforce in Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York’s Manhattan, Phoenix and San Diego. Overall, there will be 3,500 new jobs and 905,000 more square feet of office space.

“People from all walks of life come to Amazon to develop their careers – from recent graduates looking for a place to turn their ideas into high-impact products, to veterans accessing new jobs in cloud computing thanks to our upskilling programs,” Beth Galetti, senior vice president of human resources at Amazon, wrote in a blog post. “These 3,500 new jobs will be in cities across the country with strong and diverse talent pools. We look forward to helping these communities grow their emerging tech workforce.”

The company added that new staff will work in a variety of roles, including software engineers, product managers, data scientists, designers and cloud infrastructure architects. They will work for Amazon Web Services, Alexa, Amazon Advertising, Amazon Fashion, OpsTech, and Amazon Fresh and more.

Last year, Amazon scrapped plans to build new offices in Manhattan at a cost of $2.5 billion, a decision that was made after local activists complained that the expansion might drive up property prices and put a strain on public transportation.

Analysts at the time said that an expansion in New York would happen sooner or later, and they were right. The largest influx of jobs will be in that city, at 2,000 new staff working in 630,000 square feet of new office space in the Lord & Taylor Fifth Avenue building that Amazon acquired.

“Amazon has directly created more than 602,000 jobs in the U.S., and invested more than $350 billion across more than 40 states, including infrastructure and compensations,” said the company. “We estimate that Amazon’s direct investments have contributed an additional $315 billion to the U.S. economy over the last decade and supported more than 780,000 jobs in industries like construction, logistics, and professional services on top of our direct hires.”

Amazon has said that it doesn’t expect the bulk of its employees to return to the office until next year, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Nonetheless, it looks like there is no impetus to have large numbers of staff to work from home after that, unlike Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., Google Inc. and some tech behemoths that are considering keeping their office staff at home indefinitely or for the long haul.

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