Brexit Britain has received a significant boost from Amazon, which has announced that it will establish a major technology hub in Cambridge.
The new research and development centre will employ around 400 scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, with a focus on developing the company’s Echo speaker and much-reported air delivery drones.
Matt Hancock, Minister of State for Digital and Culture said the news was “fantastic”.
“Amazon’s increased investment is another vote of confidence in the UK as a world-leading centre of invention and innovation,” he said.
“The UK has been an incredibly important business for us,” Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s chief executive of worldwide consumer retail, told the Financial Times. “We [are] concentrating scientific development work in London, Cambridge and Edinburgh, because they attract great people.”
He added that the UK was “a great place to recruit machine learning expertise”, and said that, “for us, it’s a place we will continue to invest in heavily for all of those reasons.”
Amazon intends to hire 5,000 new employees in Britain by the end of 2017, boosting its workforce in the country to 24,000. It will also open three new distribution centres and a new 600,000 square foot headquarters in the centre of London.
“Programmes like the Echo/Alexa, the whole Fire TV series, Kindle, Prime Air, all of that has happened inside the UK and we expect to see more of it,” Wilke added.
Wilke’s words are at odds with much of the Cameron administration’s rhetoric during the EU referendum, which suggested investment would dry up if Britain voted to leave the bloc. The reports produced by the Treasury, led by former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, have since been dismissed as “very flawed and very partisan” by academics.
Only two out of 19 of the former chancellor’s forecasts for the impact of a Leave vote on the United Kingdom have proved accurate, causing Labour MP Gisela Stuart to say that “voters were right to see through [the] scaremongering”.
“Outside the EU, we can begin a process of national renewal and look forward to a strong and flexible economy which benefits everyone across the UK,” she added.