Amazon.com Inc. executives have made a fresh round of visits to several of the 20 finalists for its $5 billion second-headquarters project, fueling added anticipation as it nears a decision in a process that has stretched over more than a year.
The visits over the past couple of months include New York City, Newark, N.J., and Chicago, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
In addition, Amazon has been following up with other locations, including Miami and the Washington, D.C.-area, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Cities that haven’t heard from Amazon “in months” include Raleigh, N.C.
WSJ sources say Amazon’s still in negotiations with several cities and might negotiate near-final deals with a few finalists before choosing the winner.
Amazon is selecting from a list of 20 cities for the $5B HQ2 project. Jeff Bezos has said the selection would happen by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Amazon (AMZN) is opening its first office in Manchester, northern England, and expanding two other centers to house 1,000 new R&D roles in what it said was a major new investment in British innovation, Reuters reported.
The U.S online retail giant will create 600 new corporate and development jobs in Manchester, take on an additional 250 people at its development center in Edinburgh, and add 180 roles in Cambridge, eastern England, it said on Thursday.
Amazon's UK country manager Doug Gurr said Britain was taking a leading role in the company's global innovation.
"These are Silicon Valley jobs in Britain, and further cement our long-term commitment to the UK," he said.
The new engineers will work on technology including personalized shopping recommendations, machine learning, Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and its drone delivery project Prime Air, it said.
Amazon, along with other U.S. tech giants Facebook, Google and Apple, have continued to invest in Britain despite any uncertainty caused by Brexit.
Since 2010, Amazon said it had invested more than 9.3 billion pounds ($12.15 billion) in Britain and was on course to employ 27,500 people - including more than 6,500 in its corporate, AWS and R&D divisions - by the end of the year.
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