Amazon to add 2nd headquarters
Milwaukee plans bid to lure facility and its 50,000 promised jobs
Seattle-based online retailer Amazon.com announced Thursday that it is seeking a second North American headquarters with up to 50,000 jobs.
The company founded and run by billionaire Jeff Bezos said in a statement its “HQ2” would cost about $5 billion to build and operate.
The company, which is currently soliciting bids for the project, said it would prioritize metropolitan areas with more than 1 million people and that it was encouraging interested communities to think “big” and “creatively” about possible locations.
The City of Milwaukee is making a pitch for the Amazon development, said Jeff Fleming, Department of City Development spokesman.
The Milwaukee metro population is 1.57 million, ranked No. 39 in the nation, according to the Census Bureau.
Amazon said HQ2 will be a complete headquarters for Amazon, not a satellite office. It said it expects to hire new teams and executives in HQ2, and will also let existing senior leaders across the company decide where to locate their teams.
Employees currently working in HQ1 can choose to continue working there, or they could have an opportunity to move if they would prefer to be located in HQ2, it said. “We expect HQ2 to be a full equal to our Seattle headquarters,” Bezos said.
“Amazon HQ2 will bring billions of dollars in up-front and ongoing investments, and tens of thousands of high-paying jobs,” he added. “We’re excited to find a second home.”
Amazon estimated that its investments in Seattle from 2010 through 2016 resulted in an additional $38 billion to the city’s economy.
In January, Amazon pledged to add 100,000 new full-time U.S. jobs by mid-2018, many of them at fulfillment centers, including ones being built in California, Florida, New Jersey and Texas. Last month, Amazon held job fairs at 10 U.S. sites to fill more than 50,000 jobs.
This new second headquarters will likely be well-situated within Amazon’s increasingly sophisticated logistics and delivery system, which uses its own growing fleet of cargo planes along with its fulfillment centers.
Amazon is a rare tech company that has fully integrated its headquarters into an urban core, eschewing the hermetically-sealed urban campus model that Google, Apple and others have embraced.
Today, Amazon has an estimated 40,000 employees working in more than 8 million square feet of office space just north of Seattle’s downtown. The company has deliberately not built enough cafeteria space in its multiple buildings so that employees must go out into the city for lunch, as well as for other amenities such as dry cleaning and sundries. Rather than working to keep employees on site, Amazon has sought to encourage integration with Seattle.
But its workforce has become so large now that it may have outgrown Seattle.
The company is already on track to build out its footprint in Seattle by half over the next five years, according to The Seattle Times.
Adding another headquarters would give Amazon “a second place where senior execs could be, so it opens up a whole new geography for them,” said Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School and an expert on corporate strategies.
But attracting and keeping new talent will be a major factor in choosing a location, she says. General Electric’s reasoning for its move to Boston from Fairfield, Connecticut, “is they wanted to be able to get their fair share of millennials and other young talent,” McGrath said.
Tougher immigration laws could make Canada more attractive for Amazon, says Jed Kolko, chief economist at job search site Indeed. But affordable metro areas such as Detroit and Atlanta have more room for corporate expansions, he says.
In Chicago, another affordable metro area, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has already pitched the city to Bezos, according to the Chicago SunTimes.