Amazon.com Inc.’s planned second headquarters, or HQ2 as the closely watched project is officially called, will end up becoming two separate campuses on the East Coast.

That’s according to reports published in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times on Monday evening. Citing anonymous sources, the Journal said that Amazon intends to split the 50,000 employees whom it had planned to recruit for HQ2 more or less evenly between the two locations. The online retail giant has said that it intends to invest a total of more than $5 billion in the project.

Two insiders told the Times, meanwhile, that Amazon will set up the offices in New York and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia. The cities are among the locations that were named as leading candidates for the HQ2 project in another report published over the weekend.

What makes it seem even more likely that they’re at the top of Amazon’s list is the fact the company already has a strong presence in both regions. The company employs more people in Crystal City and Long Island City, the Queens neighborhood where the New York office will reportedly be located, than anywhere else outside the Bay Area and its Seattle headquarters.

One of the main reasons Amazon launched the HQ2 project last year is to expand the talent pool on which it can draw. The same motivation is believed to be behind the reported decision to split up the project. Setting up shop in two separate cities, rather than building one megacampus, would theoretically give the company’s recruiters access to a much larger number of professionals.

There are other considerations as well. Experts who spoke with the Times said that picking multiple locations would give Amazon more leverage in negotiating tax incentives with municipalities and also ease the task of finding housing for employees. But on the flip side, two offices with 25,000 employees each may not be capable of fulfilling the role Amazon originally envisioned for HQ2, which was meant to be a “full equal” to its Seattle campus.

The company could reportedly announce the locations as early as next week. That squares with the information Amazon has shared publicly so far: Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said in September that the announcement will come before the end of 2018.

Photo: Amazon