There will be an Amazon HQ2, but it will be in Seattle

When Amazon announced their plans to open a second North American headquarters, the company promised it would be the “full equal” to its Seattle home base, with 50,000 high-paying jobs and executive leadership spread across the two locations.

[whohit]There will be an Amazon HQ2, but it will be in Seattle[/whohit]But after the company decided to split the second headquarters between Northern Virginia and New York, and then drop New York entirely, Amazon’s plans for its second headquarters thousands of miles from Seattle have become much more modest.

In the meantime, the company has been growing quickly in Bellevue, Seattle, recently announcing that it will expand to 15,000 employees in Bellevue in the next few years.

It’s the latest sign that the area, 10 miles from Seattle, is Amazon’s real second headquarters, or at least the second HQ2. The company’s employee base in Bellevue has grown from almost nothing to 2,000 employees in a little more than two years. That’s still smaller than the 10,000 corporate employees Amazon has in San Francisco and on par with the company’s 2,000-person team in Vancouver, B.C. But depending on the rate of growth in each tech hub, Bellevue could overtake those offices in the next few years.