Also, the city has the most sophisticated snow removal in the western world. Both downtowns have extensive skyway systems to avoid walking outside.
The Twin Cities have 18 Fortune 500s to draw talent from. Meanwhile, Saint Paul has recently opened up a ton of prime commercial real estate at the Ford plant site (130 acres), Arden Hills armory site (>400 acres), Hillcrest Golf Club (110 acres), and the old EcoLab, Cray, and Gander Mountain buildings in the skyway system.
Transit in Central Florida is basically non-functional, and not likely to change anytime soon. The region is entirely car-centric, and there is a strong cultural bias against public infrastructure of any kind.
You can surely look up a map with lots of bus lines drawn across the Orlando core (Lynx), but the service is so remarkably horrific, I never met anyone who used Lynx in the 21 years I lived in the region.
Snow removal in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area is quite efficient and even heavy snowfall rarely causes issues. Plenty of large companies are headquartered here and do not struggle with this issue, ex: UnitedHealth, Target, Best Buy, and 3M.
Austin, Denver, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, would almost be shoe-ins if they weren't in the middle or on the west coast. All have some public transport, and good universities. It would be quite a coup if a smaller more "standalone" city got it like Charlotte, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Orlando, San Antonio, Minneapolis, or Detroit. Not sure which of these could build public transport fast enough.
I would agree they probably don't want to be near extreme weather, but I don't think they would necessarily discount a city because of snow. Not having good universities could be a deal breaker. Dallas is the definition of sprawl, sorry Dallas.
I don't think the current administration would complain if thousands of mostly liberal tech workers moved to Mexico.
Amazon seems to want a city where they would be a Big Deal, maybe the dominant employer. In New York or LA, they'd just be another big business.
Weather is an issue. They'll want some place that doesn't flood or get snowbound, since their HQ city will include some distribution centers. That knocks out Minneapolis - St. Paul, Houston, Miami, and Tampa.
They probably don't want a super high cost area, which knocks out SF-Oakland-San Jose. Maybe Washington, DC, too.
Extreme high crime areas are out - that takes out Tijuana and Detroit.
Mass transit is a specified requirement. This takes out cities with weak transit systems.
Not too close to Seattle, since they want to be more geographically distributed. That probably takes out the West Coast cities.
So what's left?
I'm going to guess Austin or Nashville. Small enough that Amazon can be a big fish in a small pond, big enough to support the work force, liveable enough that people will come, good land availability.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...