Back in October, the City of Langford announced that they’d officially submitted a bid to be the home of Amazon’s second headquarters (HQ2)…
Turns out, Amazon will still be delivering packages to Victorians’ front doors, but the company won’t be our new neighbour any time soon.
The odds were stacked against Langford, with a total of 237 other cities in the running. In fact, the chances of having success without being a city in the United States seemed to be slim to none. The only place to crack the top 20 outside the US was Toronto, Canada.
Tens of Thousands of Jobs
“Thank you to all 238 communities that submitted proposals. Getting from 238 to 20 was very tough – all the proposals showed tremendous enthusiasm and creativity,” said Holly Sullivan, Amazon Public Policy.
“Through this process, we learned about many new communities across North America that we will consider as locations for future infrastructure investment and job creation.”
In the coming months, Amazon will work with each of the candidate locations to dive deeper into their proposals. The company said it expects to make a decision in 2018.
Amazon HQ2 will be a complete headquarters for Amazon, not a satellite office. The company plans to invest over $5 billion and grow this second headquarters to accommodate as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs. In addition to Amazon’s direct hiring and investment, construction and ongoing operation of Amazon HQ2 is expected to create tens of thousands of additional jobs and tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community.
The 20 metropolitan areas moving on to the next phase of the process (in alphabetical order):
– Atlanta, GA
– Austin, TX
– Boston, MA
– Chicago, IL
– Columbus, OH
– Dallas, TX
– Denver, CO
– Indianapolis, IN
– Los Angeles, CA
– Miami, FL
– Montgomery County, MD
– Nashville, TN
– Newark, NJ
– New York City, NY
– Northern Virginia, VA
– Philadelphia, PA
– Pittsburgh, PA
– Raleigh, NC
– Toronto, ON
– Washington D.C.
