Amazon names 20 “finalist” cities in its new headquarters beauty pageant

Expansion candidates include most major East Coast cities, plus a few surprises.

This morning, Amazon posted its list of candidates under serious consideration for the company's second headquarters—a campus that the company expects to invest over $5 billion to build and will eventually house as many as 50,000 Amazon employees.

"It will be a full equal to our current campus in Seattle," a company spokesperson wrote in the announcement. "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."

That level of promised economic impact has drawn many state and local governments to craft proposals that would give Amazon rich packages of concessions—in many cases, proposals that have been kept secret from the taxpayers. A total of 238 proposals were submitted by local governments to Amazon after the company announced its continent-wide search for a second home.

Of the finalists, only Toronto is outside the continental US. Only one finalist, Los Angeles, is on the west coast; Denver, Dallas and Austin round out the field west of the Mississippi. And most of the finalists are clustered along the Atlantic coast, with the greater Washington DC area accounting for three of them (Washington DC itself, Montgomery County in Maryland, and Northern Virginia).

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post may or may not have played a role in this, but it was widely expected that the DC area would be a leading contender for Amazon's expansion—particularly as Amazon and Bezos pay more attention to what's going on at the major DC area employer, the US government.

Many of the other cities on the list already are technology centers (Boston, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, and the DC area). Others are major commerce, shipping and transportation hubs—New York, Newark, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Nashville (home of a major FedEx facility). But there are a few surprises in the list. Columbus, Ohio is on the list, as well as Indianapolis and Miami.