The talk last year at this time was the raffle Amazon was holding among cities vying for its HQ2.
But a recent examination shows how deeply ingrained Amazon has become in our cities, whether or not they are considered one of Amazon’s headquarters.
The New York Times, in a long article this weekend used Baltimore (which had lobbied unsuccessfully for HQ2) as an example.
- To the city’s southeast stand two mammoth Amazon warehouses, built with heavy government subsidies, operating on the sites of shuttered General Motors and Bethlehem Steel plants.
- Near the Inner Harbor are the side-by-side stadiums of the Ravens and the Orioles, where every move on the field is streamed to Amazon Web Services for analysis using artificial intelligence. Football players have a chip in each shoulder pad and baseball players are tracked by radar, producing flashy graphics for television and arcane stats for coaches.
- Up in northwest Baltimore, a pastor has found funding to install Amazon Ringvideo cameras on homes in a high-crime neighborhood.
Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute, a strategy firm, who lives part time in Baltimore, said in the article that Amazon’s impact only began with its retail platform.
“It’s the invisible infrastructure that powers our everyday lives,” said Ms. Webb, who examines Amazon in her book on the tech giants, “The Big Nine.” “Most of us don’t know 95 percent of what Amazon is doing.”