US East is in NoVA I think? Basically, the defacto HQ for AWS. Why would Amazon have a second HQ anyplace else was always the real question?

(They seemed to like the idea of New York a little bit. Probably because of multimodal transport connections to NoVA and the Europe/Africa side of the world. But even that fell through. And as far as I can understand, that too was because of politics.)

I live about 2 miles away. I can tell you that not only have they been building it out at a prodigious pace (they had people were working in Crystal City by the end of 1Q2019). They have signed construction contracts, leases, extended offers to employees, etc. They are committed to it now.

Also, Amazon has a tremendous footprint here already. Their largest region is located in Ashburn (~25 miles east), CIA is roughly 5 miles for Crystal City, Herndon and Ballston have large AWS sales/engineering offices, and Richmond (roughly 1.5 hours south) hosts one of their largest distribution centers on the east coast. In short, they were committed to this area long before HQ2, let alone JEDI. They cannot be happy about losing the contract award, but it was only one of many things Amazon/AWS are going in NoVA.