Apple reportedly eying Northern Virginia for new campus

Apple is the latest tech giant to eye Northern Virginia for a large campus bringing tens of thousands of jobs.

According to The Washington Post, Gov. Ralph Northam’s office proposed sites including Crystal City, Alexandria, land near the Center for Innovative Technology and Scotts Run in Tysons.

WaPo details Apple’s connections to the area:

There are also some connections to the company that could help Northern Virginia’s chances. The Loudoun County land, consisting of 85 acres outside the Innovation Center Metro station currently under construction, is owned by a partnership managed by Mark Masinter, a Dallas retail expert whom Steve Jobs hired in 2000 to help Apple open its first stores.

Vienna-based NoSQL database company FoundationDB was also acquired by Apple in 2015, Technical.ly DC reported.

Apple has said it is seeking four million square feet to house 20,000 employees for a new campus to go along with its spaceship-like HQ in California, but CEO Tim Cook later added that he didn’t want to make it a “beauty contest kind of thing,” referencing Amazon’s very public call for applications for its HQ2.

Interestingly, Northern Virginia wasn’t the only potential Apple suitor that leaked this week. Research Triangle Park in North Carolina is also on the shortlist, the Triangle Business Journal reported.

Of course, Amazon is also considering Northern Virginia as one of 20 finalists for the 50,000-job HQ2, along with D.C. and Montgomery County, Md. That led USA Today to pose the question of whether both tech giants could fit. Greg LeRoy of D.C. nonprofit Good Jobs First said it would be “a very stressful event.”

“You’d have to rebuild the economic geography of Northern Virginia,” he said.