Did Amazon Employees Unwittingly Reveal The Location Of HQ2?

Did Amazon employees, ensconced in their luxurious Seattle headquarters, just tip the company’s hand and unwittingly reveal the location of the second Amazon headquarters?

Speculation is intensifying after Arlington Now, which covers the Arlington area, noted a curious development on its website: An article from December entitled “County Wins Top Environmental Award from U.S. Green Building Council,” suddenly rocketed back to become one of the site’s most-viewed articles of the past week.

Here’s an excerpt:

Arlington County is the first community in the country to win a top award for its environmentally-friendly policies from the U.S. Green Building Council.

The county was named a Platinum level community by USGBC under its new LEED for Communities program.

USGBC said the certification recognizes the county’s creation of a “sustainable and resilient urban environment that has long-proven success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing stormwater, ensuring economic prosperity and focusing on education, affordable housing, health and safety for residents and businesses.”

Such an extremely uncommon development warranted further examination from the site’s producers, who sought to uncover where all of this traffic was coming from…

What they discovered shocked them to the core: The bulk of the traffic was traced to an internal Amazon.com page devoted to the company’s HQ2 search. Washington DC (Arlington is within the DC metro area) is one of 20 “finalists” in Amazon’s wide-ranging search for the location of its second headquarters. It’s been reported that the second headquarters will be a full equal to the company’s original HQ in Seattle.

Of course, this says nothing definitive about whether Arlington – or the broader DC Metro Area – will play host to the new HQ.

But it’s definitely worth noting. It’s also worth pointing out that researchers at Hamilton Place Strategies, an analytic PR consultancy, crunched the numbers and, in a study published Tuesday, tabulated that Washington, D.C. would be the most likely city to land Amazon’s massive second headquarters.

As ArlNow points out, an NYU professor who has written about the company opined last week that New York City and the D.C. area are among the most likely locations for Amazon’s HQ2: This is due to a combination of being destinations for talented workers and being places that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to frequent.

Being in DC would also allow Bezos to be as close as possible to the company’s lobbyists – which could come in handy as the company seeks to realize its ambitions of becoming the “everything” store…

So, what do you think? Is this accident an important clue? Or is it essentially meaningless?

Amazon unveiled its list of 20 finalists last month. They include:

Atlanta, GA
Austin, TX
Boston, MA
Chicago, IL
Columbus, OH
Dallas, TX
Denver, CO
Indianapolis, IN
Los Angeles, CA
Miami, FL
Montgomery County, MD
Nashville, TN
Newark, NJ
New York City, NY
Northern Virginia, VA
Philadelphia, PA
Pittsburgh, PA
Raleigh, NC
Toronto, ON
Washington D.C.