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

Enlarge / And the finalists are... (credit: Amazon)

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 which 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.

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