Amazon in 'advanced talks' to pick Northern Virginia for second headquarters

Amazon is reportedly in advanced talks about opening its second headquarters in Northern Virginia, in a signal the retail giant may have narrowed down its shortlist of possible locations for the new offices. 

According to The Washington Post, Amazon is looking specifically at Crystal City, with talks including which buildings it would take and how quickly it could move employees there.

The newspaper said the talks were so far advanced that one of the neighbourhood's biggest real estate developers, JBG Smith, had already pulled some of its properties off the market, and officials were considering announcing the move later this month.

People close to the process told The Post the talks were more in-depth than they had been with other locations. Amazon declined to comment on the report.  

The company has said it plans to reveal where it will base its second headquarters by the end of the year, and says it is currently assessing around 20 locations. 

Speaking on Thursday, at an event in New York, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said the decision would ultimately "be made with intuition after gathering and studying a lot of data".

"The best way to make it is you collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data, but then you make that decision with your heart," he said.

Recent reports in the US press have suggested Amazon is also looking closely at sites in New York City and Chicago. It is currently operating out of just one headquarters, in Seattle. 

The latest speculation comes just over eight months after Northern Virginia was first flagged as a potential front-runner for the new site.

Amazon has kept tight-lipped about its plans, but in February a local news website in Arlington, Virginia said a two-month-old article about the county had received a huge amount of traffic from an internal webpage at Amazon.com. 

It said more than 6,000 people had viewed the page in just one week, and "the vast majority of the traffic to the page over the past week that can be tracked came from what appears to be an internal Amazon.com page devoted to its HQ2 search". Crystal City is in Arlington county.