Amazon's Spheres, outside of Amazon's Seattle headquarters.After an exhaustive nationwide search, Amazon announced that it would divide some of its future operations between New York City and Arlington, Virginia, creating HQ2a and 2b instead of the much-anticipated HQ2. Each location will eventually employ 25,000 Amazonians and command about four million square feet of office space. Amazon will invest about $5 billion in the two campuses.

The home of HQ1 – Washington State – welcomes you to the club.

“We are excited to build new headquarters in New York City and Northern Virginia,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. “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.”

The four million square feet of space is about equal to Amazon’s planned future expansion in the greater Seattle area. The company currently occupies approximately 10 million square feet of space in the metropolitan area and announced plans to lease, rent or build another four million square feet over the next few years. That would be equivalent to three additional skyscrapers in the area’s skyline.

Amazon has been scooping up real estate at a hectic pace to keep up with record growth. Amazon has 40,000 employees in Seattle proper and the company has 8,238 news openings listed on its website at the moment. The company chose two locations instead of one to access more talent. No single site seems in the U.S. appears to be able to match Seattle’s remarkable wealth of top-tier technology workers, nor its culture of bold and often brash creativity.

Some media reports put the taxpayer incentives, investments and offsets used to attract the company at about $2.344 billion.

Avis, the perennial runner-up to Hertz in the car rental business used the slogan “When you’re only No. 2, you try harder” for almost 50 years, until 2012.

We just wanted to let Virginia and New York know it’s available again.

Read more in The Seattle Times.