Every city in North America with at least 1 million people was just handed an unprecedented assignment -- Amazon.com wants proposals by Oct. 19 on where to house its second headquarters.

The online behemoth, which is based in Seattle, said Thursday that it’s commenced a search for a new city to accommodate its future growth, promising to spend more than $5 billion and bring 50,000 jobs to what founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said will be “a full equal” new headquarters, which it has dubbed “HQ2”.

And all early indications are that the competition is going to be fierce.

Dallas, always seeing itself as a top contender for corporate relocations, was among at least a dozen cities including Boston, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and St. Louis, to publicly throw a hat into the ring Thursday. Mike Rosa senior vice president for economic development of the Dallas Regional Chamber said the group “communicated to Amazon our intent to respond.”

Amazon released 8 pages of detailed specifications about what the new site must have, including:

An international airport within a 45-minute drive

Existing buildings of at least 500,00 square feet or open land of 100 acres

A highly educated tech workforce

A strong university system

After reviewing the document, Rosa said he was more than confident that there are D-FW locations that would fit the bill. “There is no better place than right here for Amazon’s HQ2,” Rosa said.

The company also said it is seeking economic incentives. Amazon has added an economic impact section to the media section of its website. Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that promotes accountability in economic development, says Amazon has received subsidies from local and state governments exceeding $1 billion.

Whatever city gets it, “will pay quite the premium for an instant Silicon Valley,” said James Thomson, a former Amazon executive who now works with Amazon Marketplace sellers. Amazon will demand a “massive tax break,” he said.

Adding to the mix

Dallas is a corporate town, but its diverse economy has prevented it from becoming a company town. Amazon's extraordinary growth has turned Seattle into the biggest company town in America, according to a recent report in The Seattle Times, whose analysis showed the company now fills 8.1 million square feet, or 19 percent of all prime office space in the city. That compares with AT&T's footprint of 3.4 million square feet in Dallas.

The largest companies based in Dallas-Fort Worth range from AT&T and ExxonMobil to Kimberly Clark and American Airlines. The cities' employers are from diverse industries: airlines, consumer goods, retail, energy, food, technology, hospitality, health care, education, professional and real estate services and more recently automakers.

Dallas and its suburbs have made corporate recruitment a key part of the region's economic development strategy in recent years -- and leaders have touted high-profile successes, like Toyota's consolidation of its North American headquarters in Plano.

While the Dallas-Fort Worth economy is known for being a job creator, existing companies may cringe at the prospect of Amazon's presence.

“There’s lots of talent to poach,” said Paul Song, co-founder of Detail Provisions, a Dallas-based company that’s buying up men’s e-commerce brands. “Everyone is always happy to get a better job.”

Amazon has a reputation for being a tough place to work. But it pays well.

Amazon will raise salaries wherever it goes, said Matt Rutledge, founder of Carrollton-based Woot Inc., a quirky deal-of-the-day website that Amazon purchased in 2010 and still operates here. That’s what it did at Woot, he said.

Local residents looking for more job opportunities would welcome Amazon to North Texas, but other employers may not be so happy, Rutledge said.

Dallas lacks the big numbers of software engineers that Amazon would need to hire, Rutledge said. “We’re not a hotbed of that skill set.”

Partly because culturally, technology professionals prefer places like Austin, he said. For a key hire, Rutledge said he doesn’t require the person to move to Dallas. Amazon said Thursday when it has two headquarters, managers would be able to decide where they house their teams.

Dallas is used to being one of the top three choices for corporate relocations, but because of its buttoned-down reputation, Rutledge puts Dallas in the top 15.

If Amazon picks Dallas, the competition for talent is only going to get fiercer, he said.

"It's going to be a problem for me as a small company," said Rutledge, who is also co-founder and CEO of a Dallas-based tech incubator called Mediocre Corporation.

Retail industry

While Amazon is a giant technology company, it's also a retailer. And Dallas has long list of retail companies headquartered here and companies that cater to them.

Amazon recruits on the campus of the University of North Texas in Denton which has the only digital retailing degree in the U.S., said Linda Mihalick, who leads the program.

Major retailers headquartered here have created a "strong retail and consumer experience talent pool, not to mention one of the country's leading hubs for hospitality and food service business launches," Mihalick said. "There are numerous retailers and supporting technology companies that have endured the ever-changing retail climate brought on by the welcome digital disruption."

Teams of buyers from Amazon attend the January and June major wholesale events at the Dallas Market Center, said Cole Daugherty, senior vice president at the wholesale market. Major U.S. retailers including Dillard’s and Neiman Marcus have offices in the 5 million-square-foot market that attracts 200,000 visitors a year.

Texas ties

Amazon already has some big Texas connections. The company just purchased Austin-based Whole Foods Market.

Texas is where Wal-Mart came to learn the grocery business in the late 1980s. As Amazon and Wal-Mart are locked in a major grocery battle, the biggest state where Wal-Mart operates may be a challenging place for Amazon to grow its grocery business.

While Texas was the first big state a decade ago to confront Amazon over sales taxes, Bezos’ hasn’t held a grudge. Amazon, which employees 20,000 people in Texas, is in the process of building its ninth and tenth fulfillment centers in the state.

A year ago, Amazon started building its largest wind project to-date. It’s expected to be completed this year in Scurry County west of Abilene and have more than 100 turbines. In 2014, Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business, leased five floors in Two Galleria Tower.

And Bezos' own Blue Origin suborbital launch facility is located in West Texas, near the town of Van Horn.

Bezos even has personal connections to the state.

Young Jeff Bezos spent 10 hot summers on his grandfather's cattle ranch in Cotulla, and his cousin is country singer George Strait.

Bezos was born in Albuquerque, N. M., but his family moved to Houston when he was a toddler. His father was a petroleum engineer for Exxon.

He went to River Oaks Elementary School in Houston, and connected a computer to a main frame, rigging it up so that he and his friends could use it. During his sixth-grade year, the family moved from Houston to Florida.

The competition

While D-FW has some natural advantages, some real estate executives in the region said it also has some hurdles.

Experts say that the availability of labor, both educated young workers and workers in lower paid trades, could be a major hurdle as Texas -- and D-FW in particular -- continues to nab major employers.

Gov. Greg Abbott's office didn't respond to a question about whether the state will jump in with a separate proposal, or merely support business leaders from Texas' metro areas as they jockey for position.

But spokesman John Wittman said in an email that the state will, like Dallas, "aggressively court" Amazon in hopes that it'll pick the Lone Star State for HQ2.

"Amazon and Texas have developed a great working partnership over the last decade thanks to our high-quality workforce, reasonable regulations and low taxes," he said.

While it's not new for a major employer to dangle big investments that touch off bidding wars between states and regions hoping to reel in jobs, the company took a different tack by publicly soliciting competing offers.

It's a kind of mirror image of the way governments bid out contracts -- and this time, it's local officials who are left wildly speculating about which requirements they can meet for a massive corporation that, ultimately, has no obligation to even complete the project.

By contrast, when Toyota announced that it was moving its North American headquarters to Plano in 2014, it was a done deal, negotiated under a heavy layer of legally reinforced secrecy.

It's a reversal that's worth watching, said Stockton Williams, executive vice president of content for the Urban Land Institute, which studies urban development and policy.

"The Amazon site that has the (request for proposals) also has a bunch of other material clearly intended for public consumption ... the fact that they gave it a cool branded name, 'HQ2,'" he said, "indicates for Amazon that the decision to invest in a second headquarters ... is not simply intended to provide a place of work for its employees, it's to drive its brand and the image it wants to project to competitors."