Published on: November 5, 2018
The
Washington Post reports that Amazon is close to announcing that it plans to put its second North American headquarters city - dubbed HQ2 when it announced its intentions and set off a competition among hundreds of communities - in Northern Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, DC.
According to the
Post the company “has held advanced discussions about the possibility of opening its highly sought-after second headquarters in Crystal City, including how quickly it would move employees there, which buildings it would occupy and how an announcement about the move would be made to the public, according to people close to the process.
“The discussions were more detailed than those the company has had regarding other locations in Northern Virginia and some other cities nationally, adding to speculation that the site in Arlington County is a front-runner to land the online retail giant’s second North American headquarters and its 50,000 jobs,” not to mention the $5 billion investment that Amazon has pledged to make in whatever community it chooses.
However, the
Wall Street Journal reporting on the story is different, saying that Amazon “has progressed to late-stage talks on its planned second headquarters with a small handful of communities including northern Virginia’s Crystal City, Dallas and New York City … The ongoing talks with some local officials come as discussions appear to have cooled in some of the other 20 cities on Amazon’s shortlist, including Denver, Toronto, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., and Raleigh, N.C., according to people familiar with those situations.”
The
Post notes that adding to the speculation about Northern Virginia is the fact that several buildings that had space for rent have pulled that space off the market.
To be clear, the developer of those buildings has not commented about the speculation on the record, and Mike Grella, director of economic development for Amazon, posted the following message on Twitter:
“Memo to the genius leaking info about Crystal City, VA as #HQ2 selection. You’re not doing Crystal City, VA any favors. And stop treating the NDA you signed like a used napkin.” (Amazon required nondisclosure agreements of all the finalist communities.)
Amazon founder/CEO Jeff Bezos is quoted in the story as having told a conference last week that “ultimately the decision will be made with intuition after gathering and studying a lot of data — for a decision like that, as far as I know, the best way to make it is you collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data but then you make the decision with your heart.”
The
Post - which, of course, is owned by Bezos in a private investment - has another story in which the reports examined where Bezos’ private has traveled recently as a way of figuring out the likely winner:
“The jet has touched down in the Los Angeles area more than a dozen times and made multiple trips to Boston, Dallas, Miami, the D.C. area and the New York City area. Amazon named three D.C. area locations (the District, Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Md.) finalists and two in the New York area (New York City and Newark).
“The plane has not been to 11 other finalist cities. Some of those were considered long shots from the outset, among them Columbus, Ohio; and Indianapolis.
“But experts say it could signal disappointment for other cities that were considered strong possibilities, such as Chicago, Atlanta and Austin, if Bezos did not travel to those places some other way. They say it is very rare to see a chief executive choose a new headquarters site without looking at it personally, even if he or she is not involved in the early or middle stages of the project.”
