The 2nd criterion is basically the total amount of sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars available to subsidize them:
Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive
item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount.
OK, what are the options? Here's the list of the top 50 North American metro areas over the desired 1,000,000 population.[1] This gets down to the Nashville, TN area, at 1.8 million, so it's not the full list. Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are probably out, both for political reasons and being islands. Mexico is probably out given the current administration's positions. San Juan is on an island and too remote, although the tax deal in Puerto Rico might keep it in consideration.
Amazon seems to want a city where they would be a Big Deal, maybe the dominant employer. In New York or LA, they'd just be another big business.
Weather is an issue. They'll want some place that doesn't flood or get snowbound, since their HQ city will include some distribution centers. That knocks out Minneapolis - St. Paul, Houston, Miami, and Tampa.
They probably don't want a super high cost area, which knocks out SF-Oakland-San Jose.
Maybe Washington, DC, too.
Extreme high crime areas are out - that takes out Tijuana and Detroit.
Mass transit is a specified requirement. This takes out cities with weak transit systems.
Not too close to Seattle, since they want to be more geographically distributed. That probably takes out the West Coast cities.
So what's left?
Chicago
Dallas–Fort Worth
Toronto
Philadelphia
Atlanta
Boston
Phoenix
Montreal
Denver
St. Louis
Baltimore
Charlotte
Orlando
San Antonio
Pittsburgh
Cincinnati
Las Vegas
Kansas City
Cleveland
Columbus
Austin
Indianapolis
Nashville
I'm going to guess Austin or Nashville. Small enough that Amazon can be a big fish in a small pond, big enough to support the work force, liveable enough that people will come, good land availability.
I think we can assume that Jeff Bezos saw how Elon Musk played the game in 2014 to find a location for Tesla's GigaFactory.[1][2][3]
The upcoming stories for Amazon's high-profile decision will probably play out in a similar way. However, the particular candidate cities probably won't be the same since Elon was building a site for factory workers whereas Jeff is building a campus for more software developers. Therefore, a location like Austin with U.Texas compsci students to recruit is more important for Amazon HQ2 than a Gigafactory.
The desire to attract tech employers like Amazon appears to be more competitive than winning the bid to host the Olympic Games.
You have to consider that this may be a political move by Bezos. The term "anti-trust" has been brought up a lot lately in regards to 'Big Tech.' If Amazon becomes a big employer in a lot of low population states, it would effectively be buying itself those states's Senators and creating an 'Amazon Industrial Complex.'
On the other hand, Bezos might want to just move the margins and try to make a purple state blue. For a big state, that might make have a bigger impact and make more sense, especially since you're not going to find 50,000 software engineers in Montana.
I think Cincinnati could be a good choice. I don't know much about Cincinnati, except that it's in Ohio and borders Indiana and Kentucky, and that it's not a tech hub. But, I don't think it would be that hard to convince a lot of people to move there. If the move is really successful, it could create somewhat of a tech hub there, which would have spillover effects in those other states (giving them 3 for the price of 1?).
Come to Atlanta! Great schools, great weather, downtown is under utilized, decent mass transit. One of the fastest grow tech locations in the country.
We offer, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no tidal waves, no forest fires, no flooding, and once every 10 year snow storms. We are on the opposite coast which protects you from N Korean actions. Plus you can fly anywhere from our airport!
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Pittsburgh yet. uber did some early self driving pilots there. CMU is there. Google has a large office there. Amazon has also started hiring software engineers for an office in Pittsburgh too. Cost of living is very cheap. Many upsides to Pittsburgh. I don't know what the city could afford in terms of subsidies though.
Okay, yes, house prices are unrealistic, but hear me out:
1. Not in the US (helpful for any non-American employees who can't get a visa or don't want to live in the current political climate in the US)
2. Relatively easy for Americans to work in Canada
3. Close proximity to Seattle
4. Canadian salaries are typically lower than America, so this could be a huge boon to Canadians working in tech that they're finally paid similar to US counterparts and/or Amazon can save a bundle on salary costs by paying the Canadian market rate...
Why I wonder? While they're gobbling up DT Sea, they only have 1 building in Bellevue. Isn't there room to set up shop in Fremont or Kirkland and poach more engineers from Microsoft/Tableau/Expedia etc and reducing commute times? Not seeing the upside. This is a major management overhead, managing culture between both, all hands, IT infrastructure.
Austin, TX is a good candidate. Very strong engineering university attracting nationwide talent, better cost of living, they already have an office there so they must have some relationship w/ local govt, a good climate contrast to Seattle being much drier (barring the occasional hurricane), a Google Fiber city. $5B buys a lot more there than most places in the US.
Amazon is more or less conducting an auction. Cities will bid on hosting their second HQ. The best bid wins. Or maybe a better analogy is the Olympics site selection process.
Yup. "Amazon seeks a city to provide cushy tax credits in exchange for vague, unenforceable promises of job creation" would've been a more accurate headline.
I'd argue Research Triangle Park (RTP) is better choice than Austin. Instead of using one feeder school Amazon could pull from three excellent schools: Duke University, North Carolina State University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For those that are unfamiliar RTP is a major tech center.
Edit: Changed "RTP" to "Research Triangle Park" in initial comment.
I agree. There's a huge tech workforce in RTP, very good universities, affordable costs of living (which I suppose translates to affordable business property). Another indication: Take a look at the size of the Triangle AWS Meetup group on Meetup.com. It has 879 members.
That would be great! However a number of companies (like PayPal) cancelled their plans to move to the area last year because of the HB2 debacle. Not sure how Amazon feels about that. Good thing is that the situation seems to have normalized now with a democrat governor and some big companies (like HSBC) moving here this year.
If you take their transit and airport requirements seriously, Atlanta and perhaps Miami are top contenders. I'm biased, but the list of requirements looks like a description of a currently undeveloped area of downtown Atlanta that has been targeted for redevelopment:
- Utah is a top 5 state for # of Unicorn Companies
From the wiki I shared: "The Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development allows a variety of grants and tax incentives to companies willing to either relocate or expand their enterprise"
Utah could be a great fit based on Amazon's preferences for a site if they build something along the I-15 corridor. It's within 30 miles of a population center, within 45 minutes to the airport, directly off a major highway, front runner rail stations run along I-15, and you might be able to find 100 acres of space - especially if they were to put it out where the prison is now (it's moving soon).
I know you want to pitch SS but saying UoU and BYU are great universities is just wrong. Indeed, attracting talent in Utah is going to be one of Amazon's biggest challenges if it opens an office there.
I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I do AWS security consulting. I would love this. I've lived all over the US (Boulder, SF, Austin, DC, and more) and because I do remote work I can work anywhere, and I chose to move here as the best place for my interests.
I'll suggest a dark horse candidate: Indianapolis. Indy is close to two top 5 engineering colleges (UIUC and Purdue) and one top 10 business school (IU). Purdue has a unique product history with Amazon [1] and Amazon has four warehouses within an hour drive (though to be fair, that's true of a lot of cities). The city has seen major investment from outside tech companies like Salesforce [2], IAC [3], and others in recent years. Real estate and cost of living inside the city is ridiculously cheap, and there are hundreds of undeveloped acres [4] startlingly close to city center. The city has proven itself capable of hosting 400,000 people in a single day at the Indy500 every year. The state and city has a history of giving large tax incentives to outside tech companies [5].
It always amuses me how stunningly bad Amazon really is at making standalone pages on their web site. This one is totally unresponsive, has images for headings, and a slightly blurry image for the table. Here's Amazon Locker, which is even more dismal: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Click-and-Collect-with-Amazon-Locke...
I guess they must have to produce all this stuff within the constraints of their CMS, but it really does make me wonder why they can't build better standalone pages outside of it if the occasion arises.
You'll notice the same applies to Amazon's mobile apps too.
I think they just prioritize functionality over aesthetics. In a lot of cases you can claim aesthetics lead to higher customer satisfaction and conversion, but I'm certain they've A-B tested the crap out of every decision for maximum purchases.
Amazon has many examples where they execute so poorly as to verge on the incompetent. Take the ads on the Kindle for example: why advertise books to me which I already own and purchased from Amazon? And then there is Prime video streaming, which is unwatchable through some client devices in the same house where Netflix is consistently excellent quality. I think they just have big areas where they don't give a rat's ass about doing any better than "meh".
The fact that the table is in image is just lazy web development - which is pretty disappointing coming from a major company like Amazon. I understand this isn't a major client-facing site, but it would still be nice to put some effort into it.
A skilled front-end designer/developer could convert that to an HTML table in a few minutes. Instead they throw up a 672KB 6250 × 1563 JPG image which manages to appear blurry when downscaled.
Oh wow, the JPEG block artifacts in the big orange buttons on that Amazon Locker page are really something. Thank you for sharing!
I don't know if they've changed the table image on the HQ page since your post, but at the moment, it looks to me like the blurriness is mostly due to the way my browser is scaling the image down to 1280x320 px dimensions. The JPEG is large (6250x1653 px and 655 kiB) and looks sharp enough at 100% scale.
This seems like a case where using vector graphics would be more appropriate, or at least not scaling the image down by a weird factor like 4.88.
Edit: I transposed some digits when typing into the calculator and initially thought height and width were being scaled by different factors.
Minnesota. Budget surplus, tons of F500 companies / large companies to recruit from and a strong university system, with lots of other states to draw from, being the largest city in the area, save Chicago.
I think an East Coast city definitely makes the most sense. Realistically though, they probably can't get enough land in the ideal spot of NYC/Jersey meaning the next best options are DC, Philly and Atlanta. Baltimore could be a dark horse candidate. There's already a lot of construction going on there courtesy of Under Armour building out a new HQ. Charlotte could be an option as well.
My money would be on D.C. Lots of access to government agencies that could add a lot of AWS business, a major concentration of highly-skilled tech workers and colleges, close to the Washington Post, and a lot of up and coming neighborhoods in the southwest/southeast quadrants of the city. Also wouldn't hurt that it's on the opposite side of the country to add some geographic diversity.
Baltimore would be a great choice. Easy to draw talent from DC area -- housing prices much lower. Plenty of land both right in town (sad, actually) and in the suburbs. Would be a very big fish in town, and could do much to revitalize an entire city. World-class university in-town. Has a subway. DC right next door to lobby like crazy. And don't forget that Bezos has purchased a house in DC himself.
Thinking about what cities should lay out the red carpet, if I were a city official in, say, St. Louis or Detroit, I'd be putting together an incentive plan worth billions. Amazon could turn around an entire mid-size city.
And then have it (the city) by the balls forever, to the detriment of the human inhabitants who are supposed to be the ones in charge of deciding what government does.
Excellent. I think we've gone too far in trying to put all the tech work in the spots where early tech companies happened to spring up.
In the long term, I'd like to see VCs not be so provincial in their investments, so that people can start companies where they are. But in the short term, having established companies put offices elsewhere is a great next step.
> A stable and business-friendly environment and tax structure will be high-priority considerations for the Project. Incentives offered ... will be significant factors in
the decision-making process.
It's a race to the bottom. Don't fall for it. Pro sports teams, recently Foxconn, they're all running the same game. You will all end up overbidding in order to win the deal and your constituents will foot the bill.
I think it's possible Amazon is not so much shopping for a second HQ as it is looking to move work from the high rent, pro union Seattle area. Only, they saw how much negative press Boeing received after making their true intentions known for moving work to southern states. Amazon is being sneakier. If all works out, long term I imagine much of their high end development work may move from Seattle.
[+] [-] jpatokal|8 years ago|reply
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/Anything...
The 2nd criterion is basically the total amount of sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars available to subsidize them:
Please provide a summary of total incentives offered for the Project by the state/province and local community. In this summary, please provide a brief description of the incentive item, the timing of incentive payment/realization, and a calculation of the incentive amount.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
Amazon seems to want a city where they would be a Big Deal, maybe the dominant employer. In New York or LA, they'd just be another big business.
Weather is an issue. They'll want some place that doesn't flood or get snowbound, since their HQ city will include some distribution centers. That knocks out Minneapolis - St. Paul, Houston, Miami, and Tampa.
They probably don't want a super high cost area, which knocks out SF-Oakland-San Jose. Maybe Washington, DC, too.
Extreme high crime areas are out - that takes out Tijuana and Detroit.
Mass transit is a specified requirement. This takes out cities with weak transit systems.
Not too close to Seattle, since they want to be more geographically distributed. That probably takes out the West Coast cities.
So what's left?
I'm going to guess Austin or Nashville. Small enough that Amazon can be a big fish in a small pond, big enough to support the work force, liveable enough that people will come, good land availability.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
[+] [-] jasode|8 years ago|reply
The upcoming stories for Amazon's high-profile decision will probably play out in a similar way. However, the particular candidate cities probably won't be the same since Elon was building a site for factory workers whereas Jeff is building a campus for more software developers. Therefore, a location like Austin with U.Texas compsci students to recruit is more important for Amazon HQ2 than a Gigafactory.
The desire to attract tech employers like Amazon appears to be more competitive than winning the bid to host the Olympic Games.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-ingeniously-man...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2014/02/27/the...
[3] google results of similar stories: https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+bidding+nevada+texas
[+] [-] baron816|8 years ago|reply
On the other hand, Bezos might want to just move the margins and try to make a purple state blue. For a big state, that might make have a bigger impact and make more sense, especially since you're not going to find 50,000 software engineers in Montana.
I think Cincinnati could be a good choice. I don't know much about Cincinnati, except that it's in Ohio and borders Indiana and Kentucky, and that it's not a tech hub. But, I don't think it would be that hard to convince a lot of people to move there. If the move is really successful, it could create somewhat of a tech hub there, which would have spillover effects in those other states (giving them 3 for the price of 1?).
[+] [-] BatFastard|8 years ago|reply
We offer, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no tidal waves, no forest fires, no flooding, and once every 10 year snow storms. We are on the opposite coast which protects you from N Korean actions. Plus you can fly anywhere from our airport!
[+] [-] alexval|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kogepathic|8 years ago|reply
Okay, yes, house prices are unrealistic, but hear me out:
1. Not in the US (helpful for any non-American employees who can't get a visa or don't want to live in the current political climate in the US)
2. Relatively easy for Americans to work in Canada
3. Close proximity to Seattle
4. Canadian salaries are typically lower than America, so this could be a huge boon to Canadians working in tech that they're finally paid similar to US counterparts and/or Amazon can save a bundle on salary costs by paying the Canadian market rate...
[+] [-] libria|8 years ago|reply
Austin, TX is a good candidate. Very strong engineering university attracting nationwide talent, better cost of living, they already have an office there so they must have some relationship w/ local govt, a good climate contrast to Seattle being much drier (barring the occasional hurricane), a Google Fiber city. $5B buys a lot more there than most places in the US.
[+] [-] mratzloff|8 years ago|reply
As far as some of the outlying areas, I think it comes down to signaling around tax breaks from the governor[1] and available office space inventory.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/07/07/inslee-v...
[+] [-] quirkot|8 years ago|reply
Because Foxconn got such an amazing deal and we want to get some of those sweet, sweet tax credits, too
[+] [-] pc2g4d|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turk183|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nathanmuller|8 years ago|reply
Edit: Changed "RTP" to "Research Triangle Park" in initial comment.
[+] [-] metaphyze|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hydrogen18|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jitix|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolfkill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ynniv|8 years ago|reply
https://atlanta.curbed.com/2017/6/30/15900526/downtown-atlan...
http://atlantaintownpaper.com/2017/08/lawmakers-want-revive-...
[+] [-] devmunchies|8 years ago|reply
- Population > 1,000,000
- Serviced by 2 great universities (UoU, BYU)
- Utah is a top 5 state for # of Unicorn Companies
From the wiki I shared: "The Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development allows a variety of grants and tax incentives to companies willing to either relocate or expand their enterprise"
Note: I live in Seattle, not Utah.
[+] [-] xxpor|8 years ago|reply
You'd be able to attract people who live there already, but there's 0 chance someone like me would be interested in living there.
Note: I work for Amazon, but have no input at all in this process. This is the first I'm hearing about it.
[+] [-] bearforcenine|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] product50|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SaintGhurka|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottpiper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knicholes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yahna|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 013a|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2014/Q3/purdue,-ama...
[2] http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/2017/05/20/why-salesfo...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-01/iac-to-ac...
[4] http://www.indystar.com/story/money/2017/05/02/550m-gm-stamp...
[5] https://www.ibj.com/articles/58486-salesforce-to-invest-40m-...
[+] [-] bshimmin|8 years ago|reply
I guess they must have to produce all this stuff within the constraints of their CMS, but it really does make me wonder why they can't build better standalone pages outside of it if the occasion arises.
[+] [-] deanCommie|8 years ago|reply
I think they just prioritize functionality over aesthetics. In a lot of cases you can claim aesthetics lead to higher customer satisfaction and conversion, but I'm certain they've A-B tested the crap out of every decision for maximum purchases.
[+] [-] patja|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcchambers|8 years ago|reply
A skilled front-end designer/developer could convert that to an HTML table in a few minutes. Instead they throw up a 672KB 6250 × 1563 JPG image which manages to appear blurry when downscaled.
[+] [-] mohn|8 years ago|reply
I don't know if they've changed the table image on the HQ page since your post, but at the moment, it looks to me like the blurriness is mostly due to the way my browser is scaling the image down to 1280x320 px dimensions. The JPEG is large (6250x1653 px and 655 kiB) and looks sharp enough at 100% scale.
This seems like a case where using vector graphics would be more appropriate, or at least not scaling the image down by a weird factor like 4.88.
Edit: I transposed some digits when typing into the calculator and initially thought height and width were being scaled by different factors.
[+] [-] jtmarmon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericfrigot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cabalamat|8 years ago|reply
You mean it's not weighed down with tons of JavaShit and annoying transition effects?
[+] [-] relaunched|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcole2929|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkrich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkassis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maj0rhn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightball|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clavalle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterkshultz|8 years ago|reply
[1]: http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2015/09/2...
[+] [-] dionidium|8 years ago|reply
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/st-louis-prepares-f...
[+] [-] notyourwork|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1_2__4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|8 years ago|reply
In the long term, I'd like to see VCs not be so provincial in their investments, so that people can start companies where they are. But in the short term, having established companies put offices elsewhere is a great next step.
[+] [-] wyldfire|8 years ago|reply
It's a race to the bottom. Don't fall for it. Pro sports teams, recently Foxconn, they're all running the same game. You will all end up overbidding in order to win the deal and your constituents will foot the bill.
[+] [-] dpeterson|8 years ago|reply