Amazon has decided to split its new headquarters between New York City and a Washington suburb in Northern Virginia, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday night.

An official announcement from the online retail giant is expected as early as Tuesday, the newspaper said, quoting people familiar with the issue.

After a year-long search in which more than 200 cities wooed the web giant for the project — and the treasure of jobs, development and tax revenue it will bring — Amazon opted to divvy up its so-called HQ2 between the Long Island City neighbourhood of Queens in New York and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington.

Reports to this effect first ran last week in the Journal and in The New York Times.

As many as 50,000 jobs would be divided evenly between the two cities, according to these reports.

The Journal last week quoted an anonymous source as saying Amazon decided that dividing its second headquarters between two locations would spread the economic benefits as well as burdens — such as pressure on housing and transportation.

Amazon also feared that if it put the facility in one city it might not find enough engineers to staff it, the paper says. Its current headquarters is in Seattle, where the company's “urban campus” is woven into the fabric of the northwestern city.