The prevailing claim that Amazon has already chosen and is trying to extract better incentives seems wrong to me. If that was the case Amazon could have approached ~5 cities from the start with a plan for each and put a far stronger competitive pressure on them.

I think what this is really about is getting the cities to do the leg work of the research and initial planning process. Amazon wasn't going to put together 200 initial site proposals and 20 more detailed ones. By letting the cities make the proposals Amazon can look at far more potential sites than if they had done the research internally.

For what it's worth, I live in Indy and I get emails from Amazon every week trying to get me to work somewhere fairly close to here (like Detroit).

University of Illinois has top notch CS grads too, pretty close to Indy. Seems like the most likely reason they made the list.

Indy also has underrated infrastructure - having to host the massive event that is the Indy 500 every year has given the city experience in dealing with large influxes of travelers.

LoL