N&R’s Richard Barron reports on the Triad area’s proposed bid to attract Amazon’s second headquarters, dubbed “HQ2”:
The company floated its plan earlier this week: a second headquarters operation that will be the equal of its Seattle headquarters. It will require initially a half-million-square-feet of office space, billions in investment and employ eventually as many as 50,000 well-paid executives.
“We’ll probably do it in conjunction with High Point and Winston-Salem because of their (Amazon’s) requirement that it be a metro of over a million people,” said Brent Christensen, the chief executive of the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and the city’s top economic development executive. “In this case we’ll respond as a region. The details of that will still have to be worked out, but that’ll be our strategy. We know the competition will be fierce, that’s for sure.”
Mind you the competition is stiff–the N&R cites a Bloomberg opinion piece stating this will be an “Olympic caliber” competition, with large cities such as Toronto, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas or Denver on the inside track.
