- Amazon is looking for the city that will be home to its second headquarters.
- Cities are jockeying to offer the best deal for Amazon, hoping to lure more jobs and infrastructure development.
- One firm gathered predictions from 18 sources and averaged them to find the city with the best odds at landing HQ2.
In September, Amazon announced that it would invest $5 billion in developing its next headquarters and wanted cities to fight one another for a chance to host what would be called HQ2. And fight they have.
Cities have offered increasingly outlandish things to try to lure Amazon. Stonecrest, Georgia, has offered to rename itself Amazon, while several Missouri cities said they would build a Hyperloop to connect several of the state's largest metro areas.
Whichever city the e-commerce giant chooses could see a huge impact on its job growth, tax income, infrastructure development, quality of life, and more. It's why Newark, New Jersey, has offered $7 billion in tax incentives over the next 10 years to host HQ2.
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The hunt for HQ2 has led many to speculate on which city would win. The New York Times, Moody's, CNN, CNBC, and more have all published predictions. To make sense of it all, Sperling's BestPlaces, a website designed to help users find out where to live next, combined the predictions from 18 sources.
Sperling's averaged the rankings of all those predictions to come up with a meta-ranking of sorts. The average ranking of each of Sperling's top cities, along with notable sources that gave the city a top ranking, are listed below. Sperling's prediction for the final HQ2 destination is listed at the bottom.
It's worth noting that not all of the predictions that Sterling's studied were formatted the same. Some, like CNN Money's ranking, had more than one first-place finisher.
No. 13 — San Jose, California
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:CNN Money
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 12 — Toronto
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:CNN Money, GeekWire
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 11 — Pittsburgh
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:CNN Money, Venture Beat, New York Times Common Sense
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 10 — Raleigh, North Carolina
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 9 — New York City
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 8 — Denver
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 7 — Dallas
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 6 — Austin, Texas
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 5 — Washington, DC
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes: CNN Money
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 4 — Philadelphia
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 3 — Chicago
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes: Slate, CityLab
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 2 — Boston
Average rank:
Notable first-place finishes:CNN Money
Data compiled by Sperling's
No. 1 — Atlanta
Average rank: 13.6
Notable first-place finishes: New York Times Opinion, CNN Money
Data compiled by Sperling's