Amazon.com Inc. today announced that it will split its planned $5 billion “second headquarters” between New York City and Virginia, concluding a yearlong search during which the company received bids from no fewer than 238 U.S. cities.

The online retail giant originally signaled that it was looking to build just one big campus, dubbed HQ2. The grandiose headquarters would have employed more than 50,000 employees. Under the new plan, Amazon will hire 25,000 at each of the two campuses and split the $5 billion allocated to the project between them.

The company’s choice of locations matches the information that was leaked last week. The New York campus will be situated in the Queens neighbor of Long Island City, a former industrial area, while Arlington County will host the other site. To accommodate Amazon, Arlington has inaugurated a new area called National Landing that incorporates several existing neighborhoods.

The zoning change is accompanied by generous tax incentives. Amazon stands to receive just over $1.5 billion worth of performance-based incentives in New York along with $573 million from the Arlington and Virginia governments. To top it all off, the Commonwealth will spend $195 million to build new infrastructure in National Landing, including a pedestrian bridge to nearby Reagan National Airport.

Amazon promised that the development will deliver hefty returns on these incentives. The company said New York and Virginia stand to gain more than $13 billion in combined tax revenue over the next 20 years, with $10 billion of that slated to go to the Big Apple.

The retail and cloud giant also touted the fact that the average employee salary in both locations will exceed $150,000. But a large number of critics have raised concerns that an influx of highly paid tech workers could increase housing costs, potentially pricing locals out of the market.

However, critics also noted those locations also contain a large amount of talent of the sort Amazon needs, so it’s unclear how many of the workers will be new to those areas. Indeed, Amazon Chief Executive made it clear in prepared remarks that the presence of skilled workers was a key factor in the decision on the locations. “These two locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue inventing for customers for years to come,” he said.

There’s also some disapproval around how Amazon handled the bidding process with cities. Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, went as far as to call HQ2 a “ruse” in his latest podcast with Kara Swisher. Galloway argued that Amazon may have been planning to build two locations all along and simply used the prospect of one big megacampus to attract more attractive bids from city officials.

The retail giant, for its part, said that despite their smaller size, the New York and Virginia campuses will both serve the role of a headquarters just like its main Seattle hub. Amazon also announced plans to open a new operations facility in Nashville, Tennessee that will employ more than 5,000 workers.

Photo: Amazon