NEW YORK — Amazon has set its sights on two of the nation’s largest and most powerful metro areas, announcing Tuesday it had chosen a New York neighborhood and a suburb of Washington for its new East Coast headquarters.

The company’s first headquarters is in Seattle, Wash.

The online shopping giant ended its 14-month-long competition for second headquarters by selecting Long Island City, Queens, and Arlington, Va., as the joint winners. Both are waterfront communities away from overcrowded business districts, giving Amazon space to grow.

Amazon could have picked a struggling city desperate for new jobs. Instead, it decided to be in two of the nation’s centers of power. The reason Amazon gave: They are best suited to attract the high-skilled workers the company wants. The two sites will each get 25,000 jobs that Amazon said will pay an average of $150,000 a year.

The company will receive more than $2 billion in tax credits and other incentives: more than $1.5 billion from New York and $573 million from Virginia and Arlington. The hope is that Amazon will attract other companies and ultimately boost the local economies.

Not everyone is sold on the idea. “Offering massive corporate welfare from scarce public resources to one of the wealthiest corporations in the world at a time of great need in our state is just wrong,” said New York State Sen. Michael Gianaris and New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, two Democrats who represent the Long Island City area, in a joint statement.

Amazon, which started as an online bookstore two decades ago, has grown to a behemoth that had nearly $180 billion in revenue last year. The company has more than 610,000 employees worldwide, making it the second largest U.S.-based, publicly-traded employer behind Walmart.