Amazon HQ2

[mumu]

It'd be interesting to know what the package was for Nashville. The airport is similar to that of Austin in terms of number of cities served.

It is in the Central Time zone, but just barely. The sun rises and sets much earlier than in Austin.

Nashville has all the hallmarks of being a back office city without plans of making it a prime tech location. Austin is rapidly eclipsing mere back office operations. Vanderbilt is a small university that has elite liberal arts programs, but science and engineering isn't at the level of UT, and even more so with producing many graduates. (Vanderbilt graduated just 70 CS undergrads vs 477 at UTCS.)

Oracle's next expansion stages are going to be much higher tier tech than where they are starting off. Indeed, reading the tea leaves, the sheer pull that Oracle is going to make on the local employment pool in the next few years may have been one of several large yet silent factors that made Amazon pass. Oracle is going full bore into cloud and Amazon may have wanted to steer clear of being too close to their competition. There's been enough of a bruising with Microsoft as it is, in term of poaching wars, back in Seattle.