Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Photo: Vince Lim/Via Satellite

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is leasing and renovating a new headquarters for its Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation initiative Project Kuiper in Redmond, Washington. According to Amazon, the new location will be Kuiper’s primary headquarters for research and development, and its primary prototype manufacturing and qualification facility. 

The Redmond location, near Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, will consist of two buildings with a total of 219,000 square feet of space. It will include offices and design space, R&D labs, and prototype manufacturing facilities. Renovations on the facility are already underway, and the Kuiper team expects to move into the new site in 2020.

Project Kuiper, which Amazon announced in April, is an initiative to launch a LEO constellation with the intention of providing low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. Amazon has filed for permission to launch with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). GeekWire reported in April that Amazon’s filings laid out a plan to launch a LEO constellation of 3,236 satellites.