Amazon's second headquarters in North America will not be coming to the Bay Area, the company announced Thursday.
A number of Bay Area cities — San Francisco, Oakland, Fremont, Concord and Richmond — submitted a joint bid via the Bay Area Council in hopes of luring the tech giant to the region, but they were not named on Amazon's list of the final 20 cities still in the running to host the headquarters. San Jose submitted a separate bid, but the South Bay city was also turned down.
"San Jose is very pleased with the information that we provided, the proposal that we provided to Amazon for their HQ2 recruitment and that we showed them that we have great real estate, we have tremendous talent, that we have outstanding transit now and more is coming, and that San Jose offers a very vibrant urban lifestyle," Nanci Klein, the Assistant Director of Economic Development for the city of San Jose, said.
Jim Wunderman, President and CEO of the Bay Area Council, echoed similar sentiments in a statement.
"We’re very proud of the bid that the Bay Area submitted and, of course, we’re also very disappointed not to be selected a finalist," part of Wunderman's statement read. "We’re not completely surprised by Amazon’s decision. The Bay Area is one of the most innovative regions in the world and the huge economic expansion we have witnessed here over the past 10 years has created significant challenges in the form of high housing costs, high cost of living and growing traffic."
Wunderman also noted that Amazon may have passed over the region because the fight over finding top talent in the Bay Area is "fierce" due to tech giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google, and because the Bay Area is only about a two-hour plane ride away from Amazon's current headquarters in Seattle.
Some of the cities still up for consideration include New York City, Atlanta and Miami. The only California city to make the list was Los Angeles.
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Amazon plans to invest $5 billion in the new headquarters and could employ as many as 50,000 people in and around the city it chooses. Cities are in fierce competition to lure Amazon, and the company said last year that it received 238 proposals.
Among the list of 20, most were along the East Coast and Midwest, including Boston, Chicago and Columbus, Ohio. Texas and Pennsylvania both had two cities that made the cut: Dallas, Austin, Texas, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. And Toronto is the only city outside the U.S.
Amazon.com Inc. said it will make a final selection sometime this year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
