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A very large point, one that no other location can offer for revenue generation that is impactful to the bottom line of the company (remember, AWS is their number one department now, and already here). Also, nothing like fending off an anti-trust hearing (think Microsoft) like being the US governments secret keeper and the beltway’s 2nd largest single employer.. JEDI is the intro. They park at a black cable site with a fancy new HQ facility, and you can pretty much guarantee a lot more to come their way.
Lots of protests over JEDI from Oracle, Microsoft, Google and whatnot for it basically being slanted towards Amazon. But only one of them looking for a new HQ location that would make them the obvious choice for meeting the governments security requirements to handle such top secret data. For that, you need secured communications in/out directly from the source, period. Crystal City is that location for the pentagon. Main reason why Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, and several others are there now too. What people don’t realize is there is an entire city underneath there. Metro, retail, and highly secured direct lines.
DARPA does the same thing here. Key contractors must be within a ½ mile of their building. Black cable. My bet is squarely on Crystal City, and JEDI is to be announced around November 14th. Any bets HQ2 gets announced at the same time?
"With the major influx of population and infrastructure, Amazon will need to avoid the downtown core and essentially create their own city on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area. There is no need to compete for expensive and crowded downtown space. Amazon can create their own bold vision starting with a blank canvas".
AWS seems to have a relatively small operation in DC compared to the many buildings it represents in Seattle. Seattle's local "business journal" outlet (sister to the WBJ) recently said AWS has just 400,000 sf in NoVA, with 2,000 workers the potential to add 1,500 more. (They might need to expand a little based on those numbers.)
AWS is far bigger than any volume of federal contracts. It's huge in the business world. I'm guessing Seattle will continue to be the #1 cloud computing city, including the home base for the top two players and a lot of big offices among the rest.
Arlington's county board approved a plan to renovate and add retail (including a cinema, grocery, and multiple restaurants) to two Crystal City office buildings, perhaps addressing the longtime complaint about "whether it is hip enough for the employees Amazon wants to attract" (as the NYT put it).
The big question is why they'd bother renovating the long-empty 1750 Crystal office building. Owner JBG Smith filed a plan to convert it to apartments last year, then yanked that plan a few weeks ago and asked to renovate its 250,000 sq ft of offices instead.
That's like bringing coals to Newcastle: just JBG (never mind other landlords) currently owns 18 office buildings within a few blocks, with over 1,000,000 sq ft of offices immediately available (including three blocks of over 100,000 sq ft)... plus three other entirely-empty towers, including one scheduled for demolition, and preliminary planning approval for up to 15,000,000 sq ft of additional office within a mile or so.
That's certainly plenty of available space, so who could possibly want more?
Well first, to be clear, while they're very fine institutions, none of those schools (with exception to maybe U of M) are neccesarily renowed for their tech programs compared to, say, MIT, Georgia Tech or CMU. For example, Northwestern is more so recognized for its law program and Purdue is more so recognized for its engineering program.
Second, just because these schools within close proximity to Chicago produce a ton of educated talent doesn't necessarily mean they end up in Chicago.
That said, your skepticism is fair. Below is the link to the actual analysis by CBRE for you to look at if you would like to dig into it further.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, and Purdue consistently rank in the top 10 in the USA for best engineering and computer science programs. Better than every single Ivy League school and most other schools. The Big Ten schools overall are better than schools from other conferences on average (Except Ivy) academically. Chicago has great access to talent. Maryland is also in the top 10 I believe for CS.
That would certainly be interesting. For me, shockers would be LA, Miami, Columbus, and Indianapolis.
It seems like anywhere besides DC will be somewhat of a shock. I don’t think people really know what to think anymore considering the fact that early favorites like Boston, Austin, and Atlanta haven’t heard from Amazon in months while overlooked places (not necessarily on here, but in the media) like Chicago, Miami and Newark are getting follow-up visits.
Not that I necessarily think the latter cities have a leg up just because of the second visits. For example, Chicago’s second visit was to see an additional site Amazon reps didn’t see the first time (the 78). So I don’t think it’s necessarily a “second interview” type deal. But it does just make analysts’ heads explode because Amazon is still considering cities they themselves had dismissed months ago. Then again, if their analysis was truly based on the RFP criteria, and not their own, maybe they wouldn’t have their panties in such a bunch.
Last edited by JMT; 10-23-2018 at 04:49 AM..
Reason: language
As someone who lives 10 miles away from one of the 3 dc locations (Dulles), believe me when I say this, I’d love it if they shocked everyone and went to a Raleigh instead! We don’t need the:
(1) increased cost of living.
(2) traffic
(3) inevitable spinoffs invading as well
We don’t even really need the jobs, although those are always nice. But when your primary employer has a documented customer base of nearly 340,000,000 customers and growing at a net average of 6,000 per day....we’re pretty busy already!
Here's a good list that shows what i've been thinking all along specifically what Amazon would do to the real estate market of all 20 Markets. Newark and Raleigh at the top with 30% and 29% increase in home prices with Boston, LA, and DC with the least disruption at 0.4% in Boston and 4% increase in DC and LA seemes these are the only cities that can support smart integration of Amazon, kudos to Boston for being able to theoretically handle Amazon better than any city in the US. https://www.businessinsider.com/amaz...prices-2018-10
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