Among Amazon HQ2 watchers, Northern Virginia checks the most boxes

SEATTLE — Amazon won’t say where it plans to put its much-hyped second headquarters. But that hasn’t stopped investors, economic officials and developers from trying to reverse engineer the HQ2 search, to understand what a company seen as embodying the future wants and needs, and what local governments should do to be part of that future.

The growing consensus is that the place that checks the most boxes is Northern Virginia. In online betting forums, it has the best odds. Analysts at Citi recently said most investors they spoke with also expect HQ2 to end up in the Washington area, noting that Northern Virginia is home to Amazon’s cloud computing division’s “largest and fastest-growing office outside of Seattle.