They've probably already chosen their finalists for the next round and are looking for a metric to justify their choice.<p>Per [1] the list is currently Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Washington DC, and Columbus, Ohio.<p>Boston has a tech workforce that has a lot in common with SillyValley so it seems like it would be a good culture fit and for a company like Amazon the benefits to being located in the same city and sharing the same workforce as the federal government are innumerable.<p>Denver is SV-lite. If that's what they were looking for there's a lot of other West coast options that would be on the list.<p>Dallas and Colombus seem to be the wildcards. They don't have the advantages or workforce or access that Boston or DC do but they're cheap and Amazon might be betting that its size and lack of competition there would let it dominate local politics. They might also be betting that they
can tap into the "I'll move but not to CA" demographic" and get a good 5-10yr run as a monopoly on local talent until the tech scene there grows.<p>Austin, Chicago and Atlanta seem like the middle ground between Boston/DC and Dallas/Columbus.<p>I don't know enough about local economics in all those places to know how sorting by SAT scores would turn out.<p>I'm betting DC and Boston are gonna make the next cut. I don't think Denver will make the cut. the other four I have no idea.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-reveals-hq2-candidates-2018-1?utm_source=markets&utm_medium=ingest" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-reveals-hq2-candidates...</a><p>Edit: Not sure why I'm being down-voted here. Is my analysis wrong or is the suggestion that there exists people in tech who don't want to be part of the SV tech scene just that abhorrent?<p>edit2 If I wanted to evaluate the pros and cons of all 20 cities listed in [1] I'd write a real article about it and post it on HN for internet points. I just evaluated the ones the author highlighted at the top.