About 1,800 people in advertising, fashion and publishing already work for Amazon in New York, and roughly 2,500 corporate and technical employees work in Northern Virginia and Washington.
Amazon narrowed the list to 20 cities in January, and in recent weeks, smaller locations appeared to fall out of the running. For example, although Denver made the initial cut, Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado said last month, “Wouldn’t they rather have their second big hub on the East Coast?”
Amazon announced plans for a second headquarters in September 2017, saying that the company was growing faster than it could hire in its hometown Seattle. The company said it would invest more than $5 billion over almost two decades in a second headquarters, hiring as many as 50,000 full-time employees that would earn more than $100,000 a year on average.
HQ2 would be “full equal to our current campus in Seattle,” the company said. If Amazon goes ahead with two new sites, it is unclear whether the company would refer to both of the locations as headquarters or if they would amount to large satellite offices.
Picking multiple sites would allow it to tap into two pools of talented labor and perhaps avoid being blamed for all of the housing and traffic woes of dominating a single area. It could also give the company greater leverage in negotiating tax incentives, experts said.
“Even if the most obvious reasons appear to be about attracting more tech workers, the P.R. and government incentives benefits could help, too,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed, the online jobs site. With big presences in two cities, the local governments “might feel pressure to increase the incentives they are offering Amazon, and the surprise is yet another news cycle for the Amazon headquarters process,” he said.
The HQ2 search sent states and cities into a frenzied bidding war. Some hired McKinsey & Company and other outside consultants to help them with their bids, investing heavily in courting Amazon and its promise of 50,000 jobs. Even half of that would amount to one of the largest corporate location deals, according to Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which tracks corporate subsidies. “These are very big numbers,” he said.
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