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Amazon HQ2 was supposed to add jobs last year. It shed them instead

The downturn in hiring marks another setback in the boost Amazon had initially promised with its HQ2 in Northern Virginia amid a squeeze in the tech industry.

Amazon has fallen so far behind schedule in creating new jobs at its Northern Virginia headquarters that its workforce at those offices shrank last year, the company confirmed, underscoring how a project that it had initially pitched as an economic jolt is instead hitting a slowdown. Following a much-hyped sweepstakes across North America several years ago, the tech giant made a deal with state and local officials to locate half of its “HQ2” in Arlington, just outside D.C.: In exchange for as much as $750 million in taxpayer subsidies from Virginia, it agreed to build a massive new campus near the Pentagon and fill it with tens of thousands of new employees. “Last year we made the tough decision to eliminate a small percentage of corporate roles and to slow hiring around the globe, which impacted our forecast growth in HQ2,” Holly Sullivan, the company’s vice president of worldwide economic development, said in a statement Monday evening.

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