After Amazon HQ2 Locations Revealed, Puget Sound Still In Charge

SEATTLE, WA - Amazon officially announced Tuesday it will build two separate locations in New York City and Arlington, Va., as part of the HQ2 process. But Amazon's total footprint in Washington will still be much bigger.

The Long Island City and Crystal City HQ2 locations will get about 25,000 jobs and $2.5 billion in investment each. In Washington, Amazon employs double the number of people and has spent many billions more since 2011 on jobs and infrastructure, according to a company spokesperson.

Amazon reviewed 238 proposals from across the U.S., Canada and Mexico to host its second headquarters in North America. Cities like Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Dallas all made the short list, but lost to cities that already have ties to Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos.

"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’s investments in each new headquarters will spur the creation of tens of thousands of additional jobs in the surrounding communities. Hiring at both the new headquarters will begin in 2019. The Operations Center of Excellence will be located in downtown Nashville as part of a new development site just north of the Gulch, and hiring will also begin in 2019," Amazon wrote in a statement Tuesday.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called Queens' HQ2 the "single biggest economic development deal in the history of New York City." Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, meanwhile, called the HQ2 locations "branch offices" compared to the company's Seattle headquarters.

Amazon employs about 50,000 people in Washington, which includes workers at its headquarters in Seattle and at fulfillment centers in Kent, DuPont, and Sumner. Between 2011 and 2017, the company spent about $37 billion in Washington between infrastructure and jobs, a company spokesperson told Patch.

Amazon will get generous tax breaks from both New York and Virginia.

New York will give Amazon incentives worth up to $1.5 billion. Those incentives will come in the form of a $48,000 per-job credit, plus a $325 million grant for developing new buildings in Long Island City.

Virginia will give Amazon $573 million in incentives and credits. Most of that, about $550 million, will come from a $22,000 per-job credit for each job that pays $150,000 or more. Amazon is also competing (with Microsoft) to win the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to provide cloud computing services for the Department of Defense. Bezos also owns Arlington's local paper, the Washington Post.

Amazon will invest about $2.5 billion in each new HQ2 location.

Nashville will also get a piece of the action. The city will get an "operations center of excellence" with 5,000 jobs. Tennessee will give Amazon about $102 million in incentives for the Nashville operation.

File photo by Neal McNamara/Patch