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Amazon Plans To Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities, Report Says (wsj.com)
Amazon plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two locations rather than picking one city for HQ2, WSJ reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter, a surprise decision that will spread the impact of a massive new office across two communities. From the report: The driving force behind the decision to build two equal offices in addition to the company's headquarters in Seattle is recruiting enough tech talent, according to the person familiar with the company's plans. The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems. [...] The report, published Monday, did not specify the locations Amazon is exploring, but on Sunday, the newspaper had reported that the ecommerce giant was in late-stage discussions with Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas and New York City. [The aforementioned link may be paywalled; here's an alternative source.]
when you can have two? It's double the incentives.
The paragraph summary is all the article says. It is all rumors at this point with three cities identified "Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas, and New York City"
start-article
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -2.01% plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two locations rather than picking one city for HQ2, according to a person familiar with the matter, a surprise decision that will spread the impact of a massive new office across two communities.
The driving force behind the decision to build two equal offices in addition to the company’s headquarters in Seattle is recruiting enough tech talent, according to the person familiar with the company’s plans. The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems.
Under the new plan, Amazon would split the workforce with 25,000 employees in each city, the person said.
Amazon is in advanced talks with multiple cities but hasn’t made a final decision on which two locations it will pick, according to people familiar with the matter. The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that Amazon was in late-stage discussions with Crystal City in Virginia, Dallas and New York City.
A decision and announcement could come as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. /end-article
Then they can play the 2 cities against each other to maximize incentives/bribes!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Wouldn't that have the highest costs of any city they considered?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
They would have included that important information. The great thing about summarizing a story is that it is often difficult to come up with information that the source article does not have.
I still don't understand how multiple headquarters is supposed to work. The purpose of a headquarters is to have a place to get ideas in front of the decision maker. Is Bezos going to spend a week each month at each location?
If he isn't there, it isn't really headquarters. It sounds to me like a giant grift for taxpayer money.
I've seen similar stunts in the past.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I'd believe the Crystal City over everything else. That's where a lot of big government/defense deals go down, and Amazon is probably just giggling to itself after some Google employees decided to stage antiwar demonstrations over the past few months. (Heck, if I was Amazon, I might be paying my competitor's employees to act up.) The GCP and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms are for real (unlike, say, Oracle/IBM "clouds") and both work better in many instances than Amazon's, but if Amazon can lock itself in as the first provider of federal cloud services (and just maybe let them look at peoples' purchase history once in a while) then it's smiling all the way to the bank.
"The move will also ease potential issues with housing, transit and other areas where adding tens of thousands of workers could cause problems."
They're concerned about housing for tens of thousands of workers and they're considering New York City as one of the options? I haven't lived there myself, but from everything i've heard decent, reasonably priced housing is not something that can be found in New York City.
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They're not going to have two headquarters on the east coast. And, Dallas is super Fortune 100 friendly. Additionally, it has a reasonable cost of living, and the same I am sure can be said of Crystal City, VA. Seems highly unlikely to me you'd want your new HQ in one of the most competitive and expensive labor markets in the country.
They are turning in to the same type of defense contractor company. They setup a part of the business in multiple states. The get huge contracts and handouts from the government, states, cities, etc. If the incentives will never dissappear because no senator wants to be responsible for the vote that made amazon leave the area, taking 20k jobs with it. It's the same thing defense contractors do. 18 billion dollar contracts keep flowing into them, and they split the work between multiple state locations. That ensures no senator will vote against the contract, because if they do, the project shuts down, so do the plants, and that state loses the multiple thousands of jobs.
Same formula, different company.
Huh... There was actually a company a recruiter was trying to get me to interview at that was pretty much structured that way. They had their location where all the stars went, and their location which, how shall we say, did not feel respected or valued by management.