Living in the DC-NOVA area, Amazon coming here seemed rather inevitable. There's a confluence of infrastructure, cheap office/datacenter space, and a stealthily growing engineering talent pool that Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon and the general smorgasbord of government contractors have built up over the years.

Additionally,it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon has seen the obscene amounts of money Microsoft is making pitching cloud security and general technical support to the government, and wants in on it.