SEATTLE _ Amazon.com's headquarters expansion will be in Arlington County, Va., and the Long Island City neighborhood of New York, the company announced Tuesday.
The announcement ends a 14-month search for what Amazon had originally billed as a $5 billion second headquarters, which the retail and technology giant aimed to staff with 50,000 workers. This fall, people familiar with Amazon's site selection process say, the company changed course and decided to split its HQ2 to more than one place.
Amazon said Tuesday that it plans to staff each of the two cities with about 25,000 workers in about 4 million square feet of office space, with an option to double that square footage.
The company's Seattle headquarters employs about 45,000 people spread over 10 million square feet of office space.
In selecting the New York and the Washington area, Amazon chose two of the few metropolitan areas in the U.S. that have more workers employed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics than Seattle. The two sites are similar, located on spokes of transit lines, across the river from central business districts, and a short distance to airports _ Reagan National, in Virginia, and LaGuardia in New York.
The two areas already have Amazon's biggest satellite offices east of the Mississippi. Herndon, Va., is the East Coast headquarters of the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing division, part of a 2,500-person staff in the area. New York has Amazon workers focusing on advertising and book publishing with a staff of about 1,800.
Amazon didn't say what the new employees hired to staff its new offices will do. Splitting corporate command and control functions among multiple headquarters would be unusual.
Amazon's corporate structure has three titular chief executives. Reporting to founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is Jeff Wilke, who runs Amazon's retail and logistics business, and Andy Jassy, chief of Amazon Web Services.
The retailer added another twist in its Tuesday blog post announcing its selection: a 5,000-person satellite office in Nashville, Tenn. That outpost, the company said, will be an eastern hub for logistics work.
Tax breaks and other government incentives to support Amazon's projects in the three cities total at least $2.4 billion, according to the figures Amazon provided in its blog post.
