Online retail giant Amazon Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has decided to split its second global headquarters in two locations along the U.S. east coast – in New York and northern Virginia.
The online retailer plans to announce Tuesday that it has chosen the Queens neighbourhood of Long Island City and an area of Arlington, Virginia known as Crystal City as the twin sites of its second headquarters.
Tuesday’s public announcement brings to a conclusion a year-long contest that started with 238 candidate cities around the world and ended with a surprise split of Amazon’s second headquarters, which the company is calling "HQ2."
Among the finalist cities that Amazon was holding advanced talks with were Dallas, Texas; Long Island City in New York; Arlington near Washington, D.C.; and Toronto, Ontario, according to reports by Reuters. In the end, Amazon decided on the New York and Virginia locations.
Amazon sparked a bidding frenzy in September 2017 when it announced it would invest over $5 billion U.S. to create an HQ2 in addition to its home base in Seattle and hire up to 50,000 people – the majority of them high-tech workers with salaries in excess of $100,000 a year.
Cities and states promised billions of dollars in tax breaks and other inducements in exchange for Amazon's HQ2. They also handed over infrastructure, labour and other data that could prove useful in other ways to the world's largest online retailer. Canadian cities that bid for Amazon’s new headquarters included Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver. But, in the end, only Toronto made it to the late stages of negotiations with Amazon.
