Amazon.com Inc. has selected New York and Northern Virginia for its second headquarters, ending a more than year-long contest that has seen frenzied bidding from locales across North America.
In addition, Amazon announced that it has selected Nashville for a new “Center of Excellence” for its operations business, which includes customer fulfillment, transportation, supply chain and other similar activities. The Nashville location will create more than 5,000 jobs.
Amazon’s plan to split its second headquarters, dubbed “HQ2,” evenly between two cities will boost its presence around New York and the nation’s capital as it seeks to gain a recruiting edge over Silicon Valley tech firms.
The company had originally said in September 2017 that it would spend more than $5 billion and add up to 50,000 workers at a single location for its second headquarters.
It has got more than 200 proposals since then from cities and states promising billions of dollars of tax breaks and other inducements in exchange for HQ2. The bidding locales also handed over infrastructure, labor and other data that could prove useful in other ways to the world’s top online retailer.
Among the finalists that Amazon was holding advanced talks with were Dallas, Long Island City in New York and Arlington near Washington, D.C..
The New York Times reported last week that Amazon was finalizing plans to select the Long Island City, New York and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia.
New York Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioned the planned investment by Amazon late Monday in a series of tweets.
“Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here,” she wrote.
Greater Boston was one of 20 semi-finalists announced last winter.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh pitched the 161-acre Suffolk Downs former racetrack property in East Boston and Revere as the city’s top choice. Owner HYM Investment Group even hired Boston-based CBT Architects to design a 500,000-square-foot office building to kick off an early phase of the project, to meet Amazon’s timeline to begin HQ2 in 2019. Boston also provided Amazon with a menu of other sites in the Seaport District and downtown area.
A separate proposal by Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone incorporated sites along the MBTA Orange Line in Somerville, Cambridge and Boston.
Economic analysts and siting consultants gave Greater Boston high marks for its tech industry and pool of experienced programmers, but rapped the area’s high housing costs and strained transportation systems.
Amazon first established a local office in Cambridge’s Kendall Square in 2012 and expanded last summer into Boston with an over 150,000-square-foot office at 253 Summer St. in Fort Point. It leased 430,000 square feet on parcel L4 in the Seaport Square master-planned development for an office building scheduled for completion in 2021, and has an option for a second building. Each building would house 2,000 employees.
