After months of deliberations, data dumps, short lists and wish-lists, Amazon has finally announced the location of its second headquarters, HQ2, and as it has been widely reported, “2” is the important detail here: Amazon has named not one, but two different cities, New York (specifically, Long Island City in Queens) and Arlington, Virginia, as the sites for its new major offices, which will sit alongside its current Seattle, WA location, making three global headquarters for the e-commerce and cloud services giant.
“We are excited to build new headquarters in New York City and Northern Virginia,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, in a statement. “These two locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue inventing for customers for years to come. The team did a great job selecting these sites, and we look forward to becoming an even bigger part of these communities.”
Amazon says it will invest $5 billion ($2.5 billion in each location) and create more than 50,000 jobs across the two new locations, with more than 25,000 employees each in New York City and Arlington. Nashville will also become a new Center of Excellence for its Operations business, Amazon said. It will be focused on fulfillment, transportation, supply chain, and related areas, with 5,000 jobs to be filled.
It will also be getting some money: specifically, “Amazon will receive performance-based direct incentives of $573 million based on the company creating 25,000 jobs with an average wage of over $150,000 in Arlington,” and “Amazon will receive performance-based direct incentives of $1.525 billion based on the company creating 25,000 jobs in Long Island City,” the company noted.
The new Washington, D.C. metro headquarters in Arlington will be located in National Landing, and the New York City headquarters will be located in the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens, Amazon said.
It’s hard to say whether this was not just an elaborate marketing ploy, where Amazon was able to amass a huge swathe of data of a run of cities across the US, rather than a genuine search for a location (or locations) that, at the end, of the day, felt very obvious, but they are notable nonetheless.
In both cases, they are very strategic choices for Amazon:
Arlington puts Amazon in striking distance of DC, which is a huge market for the company in terms of government procurement and its AWS business, but perhaps most importantly because of its increasing need to play nice with regulators.
New York, on the other hand, gives the company a base much closer to the media industry and also the world of finance. The company is shaping up to be a huge advertising behemoth, and also has become a content juggernaut in its streaming business, alongside publishing and other areas where it was already strong. Putting itself in the heart of those industries, which all call NYC their unspoken “capital”, makes a huge amount of sense.
What will be interesting to see is how Amazon develops and whether it will continue to view Seattle as its spiritual home, or whether it really does make a significant shift of power and administration to these other locations. It’s worth noting the the company has made huge efforts globally to build large centres of operations and R&D, so it’s no stranger to globalisation and distributed work.
More to come.
