Amazon picks new headquarters
Second hub split between New York City and Virginia
Amazon.com will build offices for up to 25,000 people in New York City’s Queens borough and in northern Virginia, near Washington DC, it said on Tuesday, ending a year-long bidding war for a $5bn second headquarters that will now be split in two.
Nashville, Tennessee, will be home to Amazon’s new East Coast hub of operations, adding 5,000 corporate jobs.
The move boosts Amazon’s presence around New York City and the US capital while also giving it a bigger foothold in the centre of the country as it seeks to gain a recruiting edge over Silicon Valley tech companies.
The Washington headquarters will be in National Landing in Arlington, Virginia, and the New York City headquarters will be in the Long Island City neighbourhood in Queens.
“These locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue inventing for customers for years to come,” Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said.
Amazon received more than 200 proposals from across North America vying for a home base in addition to its Seattle headquarters. New York and Virginia beat out 18 others, including Los Angeles and Chicago, on a shortlist Amazon released in January.
Cities and states promised billions of dollars in tax breaks and other inducements in exchange for Amazon’s second headquarters. They also handed over infrastructure, labour and other data that could prove useful in other ways to the world’s largest online retailer.
It was not immediately clear how negotiations unfolded once Amazon settled on the plan for two offices. The company had originally said it would spend more than $5bn and add up to 50,000 workers at one location.
Amazon said the split would give it more geographic diversity for recruiting and could also help lessen congestion and costof-living increases that would have accompanied one office.
The company has already had to navigate similar issues at its more than 45,000-person urban campus in Seattle.
An affordable housing crisis there prompted the city council to adopt a head tax on businesses in May, which Amazon helped overturn in a subsequent city council vote.
The two areas already have relatively low unemployment rates, and Fitch Ratings has noted that even a full headquarters represents only 1.5% of the Washington area and 0.5% of the New York area’s labour force.
Some critics had pushed for more transparency from cities and states in the bidding process, warning that the benefits of hosting an enormous Amazon office might not offset taxpayer-funded incentives and other costs.
The company has said it helped boost Seattle’s economy indirectly by $38bn between 2010 and 2016.
Construction and service work had increased, catering to Amazon, and the company said it also helped attract other Fortune 500 businesses to Seattle.
THESE LOCATIONS WILL ALLOW US TO ATTRACT WORLD-CLASS TALENT THAT WILL HELP US TO CONTINUE INVENTING