A rumor that circulated online in May 2025 claimed the e-commerce giant Amazon announced plans to leave the U.S., moving its headquarters to a new location outside the country. Snopes readers searched for this matter with phrases including "Amazon leaving America" and "Amazon leaving U.S."
This matter circulated in the days following reporting that Amazon said it did not plan to display costs associated with U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs next to product prices on its website, despite previous reporting saying the opposite.
However, as for the rumor, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no evidence of news media outlets credibly reporting about Amazon intending to leave the U.S. Instead, those searches located numerous YouTube clips hosted by untrustworthy channels promoting various false rumors.
An Amazon spokesperson told Snopes by email, "These videos are patently false and we've reported them as misinformation to YouTube." Snopes also contacted the White House to ask if it wished to comment for this article.
Poking holes in the false YouTube videos
As one primary example of the rumor, on May 13, a user managing the Auto Edge YouTube channel posted a video (archived) with the title, "BREAKING! Amazon Replied To Trump's Tariffs By Leaving America, Trump Completely LOSES IT!" The clip received more than 452,000 views.
The video's thumbnail picture displayed an inauthentic Fox News "breaking news" broadcast image showing photos of Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and executive chairman, telling Trump, "F*** your tariffs." The image also displayed the text, "Bye Seattle" — a reference to the location of the company's headquarters. Fox News never aired any such graphic, no record exists of Bezos making the vulgar remark and Amazon did not announce a departure from its Seattle headquarters. Other popular videos promoting the same rumor — and users' posts sharing the clips on Facebook (archived), Threads (archived) and X (archived) — also featured inauthentic thumbnail images.
(Image courtesy of Auto Edge/YouTube/Snopes pixellation)
The Auto Edge YouTube video begins with several authentic news clips from CNBC and MSNBC. At the 1:24 mark, the video displays an article from The Seattle Times with the headline, "Amazon's announcement of HQ outside of Seattle sends ripples through state's political circles." The video's narrator, possibly generated with artificial intelligence, says, "Without warning, Amazon's global leadership announced it would relocate its headquarters beyond the borders of the United States. Not a symbolic second campus. Not a satellite expansion. The entire global command structure."
However, that same Times article (archived) dated not to 2025 but instead to September 2017. At the time, the story's two authors reported the company planned to establish a second headquarters — not move away from Seattle. Several years later, in 2023, Amazon opened (archived) the first phase of its second headquarters at Metropolitan Park in Arlington, Virginia.
At the 3:33 mark in the Auto Edge YouTube video, the narrator further says Amazon's leaders established an initiative named "Project Silver Compass," with the goal of finding a new host nation for the company's headquarters. Searches on Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no credible information about any such project. During this part of the video, the clip showed muted footage of the 2011 drama "Margin Call" to depict the supposed discussion about the made-up project.
Snopes reached out by email to the Auto Edge YouTube channel, including asking its managers about its lack of fictional-content disclaimers and why they creates videos telling made-up stories, as well as requesting information about the names of other channels they own. We also asked them to acknowledge the rumor of Amazon leaving America was false.
YouTube channels similar to Auto Edge usually share no connection to genuine news organizations, display no associated websites and do not reveal the names of the people who manage their content, nor do they specify the country in which those managers reside. Owners of such channels seek to earn YouTube advertising revenue based on publishing made-up content about entertainment, political and sports matters. The efforts potentially also involve a goal of building up subscriber numbers to sell the channels.
For further reading, a previous fact check examined a genuine quote from Bezos, in which he once said he tells employees to "wake up terrified every morning" in order to best serve customers.