Report: Amazon HQ2 Coming to Northern Virginia, NYC
Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO Cliff Owen/AP
By
Frank Konkel
Amazon’s presence in the Beltway is set to grow, according to The New York Times.
Tech giant Amazon will split its second headquarters between two locations after a year of searching, according to a report Monday from The New York Times.
While Amazon has not formally announced its plans, the Times reports the company is zeroing in on two locations: the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens and the Crystal City area of Arlington in Northern Virginia.
Arlington was one of 20 locations that made Amazon’s final cut following bids from 238 cities, and one of three in the Beltway area, including Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
A split headquarters could bring as many as 25,000 new jobs—paying an average of $100,000 per year—to Northern Virginia, but Amazon already has a significant footprint in the region.
Last year, Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s most profitable company, announced a new East Coast corporate headquarters in Fairfax County, creating 1,500 new jobs.
In only a few years, AWS—the largest cloud service provider in the world—has become an important government contractor, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts from agencies including the CIA, Securities and Exchange Commission, NASA and the Defense Department.
AWS is also the frontrunner to the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, a military cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion over 10 years.