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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
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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