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Another West Coast high-tech behemoth is headed to Northern Virginia.
Amazon.com, the billion-dollar online bookseller, plans to locate distribution and data center operations in Fairfax County, near Dulles International Airport, according to sources familiar with the company's search.
Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Virginia officials are expected to announce the move in the next couple of weeks.
The Seattle-based Internet merchant will open a $40 million data center in the next few weeks, a Virginia official said.
The center will have 17 employees to start and 50 by 2002. The company is in line for some work force assistance from Richmond.
Amazon initially will lease between 100,000 and 200,000 square feet along the Route 28 corridor, but eventually it could hold a lease for several hundred thousand square feet.
On the technology side, the location is near the MAE East Internet hub in Vienna, where major parts of the Internet converge.
That would allow Amazon and its growing number of online partners to enhance their technical infrastructure operations, which could include increasing their Web-hosting capabilities and server capacities.
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