Chicago Among Cities Vying For 2nd Amazon Headquarters
CHICAGO (AP) - A spokesman for Mayor Rahm Emanuel says Chicago plans to pursue Amazon's second headquarters.
Amazon on Thursday announced that it's hunting for a second home outside Seattle. The company said it will spend more than $5 billion to house as many as 50,000 employees.
The Chicago Tribune reports that Emanuel spokesman Grant Klinzman says the mayor has spoken with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about choosing Chicago for the site. Klinzman says Chicago plans to respond to Amazon's request for proposals.
Bezos says the company plans to stay in its sprawling Seattle headquarters and the new space will be "a full equal" of its current home.
Cities and states have a little more than a month to apply and the company said it will make a final decision next year.
It didn't hint about where it might land, but its requirements could rule out some places: It wants to be near a metropolitan area with more than a million people; be able to attract top technical talent; be within 45 minutes of an international airport; have direct access to mass transit; and wants to be able to expand that headquarters to as much as 8 million square feet in the next decade. That's about the same size as its current home in Seattle. Co-headquarters, though, often come about as a result of mergers.
Amazon said its search is open to any metropolitan area in North America that meets the parameters — the city itself doesn't necessarily have to be a million people — but declined to say how open it was to going outside of the United States.
"We want to find a city that is excited to work with us and where our customers, employees, and the community can all benefit," the company said on its search website, about why it was choosing its second headquarters through a public process.
Amazon's current campus in Seattle takes up 8.1 million square feet, has 33 buildings and 24 restaurants and is home to more than 40,000 employees.
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