Amazon receives 238 bids for its second headquarters

Amazon says it received 238 proposals from North American cities, states and provinces interested in serving as the online retailer’s second home.

The tally, released on Monday, includes cities in 43 states — all except Arkansas, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming — as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Outside the U.S., cities from seven Canadian provinces applied, as did cities in three Mexican states.

Amazon provided the tally in an update to the company’s website, but didn’t identify the bidders by name.

The disclosure comes after Amazon’s Thursday deadline for cities to submit bids on the company’s second headquarters campus, or HQ2. The company said last month that it would build out a second headquarters, equal to its Seattle campus, in some North American city, spending $5 billion over the course of more than a decade.

That promised economic benefit, bringing up to 50,000 jobs, drew submissions from hundreds of cities, including many that didn’t meet the criteria Amazon had laid out, including a metropolitan area of more than 1 million people and ready access to mass transit and a major airport.

Amazon’s bidders include most of North America’s largest cities, from Los Angeles to Chicago and Toronto, and some seen as longshots, such as Greensboro, N.C., and El Paso, Texas.

Amazon has said it will select a second headquarters site by next year.