Amazon Is Splitting Its Headquarters Between NYC and Arlington

Amazon announced on Tuesday that it’s building not one, but two new headquarters. One is landing in the Long Island City neighborhood of New York City, while the other is coming to Arlington, VA. The company will also be opening a new Operations Center in Nashville, TN. Amazon will be investing $5 billion and bringing on 25,000 new employees between the two headquarters, along with 5,000 more in Nashville.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO says “These two locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue inventing for customers for years to come. The team did a great job selecting these sites, and we look forward to becoming an even bigger part of these communities.”

This announcement marks the end of a year-long bidding process in which hundreds of cities across the U.S. and Canada attempted to court Amazon for the jobs and capital its headquarters would bring. As the winners, NYC and Arlington will receive $2.5 billion in investments, while Amazon will see tax breaks it definitely doesn’t need. The company will receive “an estimated incremental tax revenue of $3.2 billion over the next 20 years” from Arlington alone. It even stands to garner “performance-based incentives” of up to $573 million from Arlington and a whopping $1.525 billion from NYC.

Amazon, already one of the biggest companies in the world, is profiting massively off of a move it was going to make no matter what. Not to mention the fact that it’s come under fire recently for taking away workers’ rights under the guise of a pay raise, which met with strikes on Prime Day. And let’s not forget about Bernie Sanders calling out Bezos on Twitter after discovering many of Bezos’ employees were on food stamps.

Already, as Paste’s Jacob Weindling writes, the move has exposed the dramatic fault lines between the new and old Democratic party.