Chart from “Quantum Technology in Washington State.” Washington state has assembled the country’s deepest bench of quantum technology assets — including two major cloud platforms, a national lab and the first U.S. quantum computer factory — but has captured almost none of the federal money now...
A field-level view of the real grass that was installed at Lumen Field ahead of World Cup matches in Seattle this summer. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has made a fortune backing things that grow. Whether that will include real grass in the...
Kevin Carlberg, founder and CEO of Noosphere Labs. (UW Photo) A former Meta AI research director has raised $10.25 million for a Seattle-area startup working on what it calls “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world,...
(Amazon Photo) Amazon is scaling up for back-to-school season, expanding its network of Locker package pickup points to more than 750 locations across 500 U.S. colleges and universities. The expanded footprint — part of Amazon’s broader network of more than 25,000 delivery hubs nationwide —...
Neal Katyal, a former U.S. acting solicitor general who leads Milbank’s U.S. Supreme Court practice, is representing Kalshi in state cases across the country. (Milbank Photo) Washington state is emerging as a key battleground in the national fight over whether federal commodities oversight...
(WalletHub Graphic) Thirty-two states are considered better places to live than Washington, according to a new study that ranks a variety of factors impacting livability. WalletHub’s 2026 “Best States to Live In” list puts Washington at No. 33 with an overall score of 49.70 based on five key...
Wisk completed the first flight of its Generation 6 autonomous, all-electric eVTOL last year. Photo via Wisk Archer Aviation is acquiring three Boeing subsidiaries focused on autonomous aircraft, airspace management and unmanned systems, a deal that will significantly expand the electric...
Hannah McClellan Richards. (LinkedIn Photo) — Hannah McClellan Richards has left Amazon after more than 15 years to become chief operating officer of micromobility company Lime. “Ensuring hundreds of thousands of light electric vehicles are available, fully charged, when and where riders need...
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, right, trains with UFC fighter Merab Dvalishvili aboard a barge on Lake Tahoe. (Image via Instagram) Man vs. machine might be the rallying cry of our future with AI, but for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the fight is here now — in more ways than one. Zuckerberg, who...
Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME’s director, is principal investigator on the grant. He started the Global Burden of Disease study in the early 1990s. (IHME Photo) The Gates Foundation broke its own record at the University of Washington with the largest charitable gift in university history: $540.2...
Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Aug. 2, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
John Cook studies the 2009 Puget Sound Tech Universe map while recording this week’s GeekWire Podcast, with WTIA’s 2026 Washington Tech Universe map on the table behind him. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) This week on the GeekWire podcast: SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company,...
A scene from the short film Subway 3 from director David Ahn, which will be shown at the Seattle AI Film Festival later this month. As debates over AI’s role in creative work intensify, the second annual Seattle AI Film Festival (SAIFF) is betting that filmmakers don’t have to choose between...
A painting of Jimothy, the viral raccoon, by Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward. (@henry_beyond_museums via Instagram) A friendly challenge sparked by a portrait of Jimothy, Seattle’s favorite short-spined raccoon, has now drawn in 11 regional heavyweights — and with a big new donation from Amazon,...
A new Waymo Ojai vehicle spotted in a Fred Meyer parking lot in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood on Friday. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Waymo has added one mo’ type of vehicle to its fleet in the Seattle area, where the company has been testing for the launch of its autonomous taxi service...
From left: Ryan Burns of Responsible AI Washington, Amy Harris of the Washington Technology Industry Association, Yuki Ishizuka of the Washington Attorney General’s Office, and Katy Ruckle of Washington Technology Solutions, at Wednesday’s panel on the state AI task force’s final report. (GeekWire...
When you give AI a goal, it will pursue it, whether or not you like the implications. (Created with GPT-5.6 Thinking) Between July 21 and August 6, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each disclosed that AI under evaluation had broken into other companies, and the UK’s AI Security Institute disclosed...
HItchPiggy founder Skylar Windham, left, on a trip to Florida with his friend and former graduate school professor Alexis Cancemi. Planning a trip to a college campus, concert or Northwest landmark? Portland startup HitchPiggy is betting the ride you need may already be headed out on the...
Salesforce offices in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Salesforce is cutting 59 jobs in Washington state, impacting a wide variety of tech roles at offices in Seattle and Bellevue, according to a new state filing. The layoffs at the San Francisco-based...
Charles Lamanna, EVP of Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, at a GeekWire event in March 2026. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) GeekWire is profiling over the next few weeks some of the people and teams that are shaping the evolution of Microsoft in what we’re calling its “Microsoft 2.5”...
A Wild Zebra math problem framed around baking, one of the interests the student selected. After the student works out that each section is 1/12 of the cookie, the AI confirms the step and asks the next question rather than finishing the problem. (Wild Zebra images, click to...
Zillow Group’s revenue rose 18% to $772 million in the second quarter, beating its own forecast, but a $36 million restructuring charge from severance and other costs stemming from this week’s layoffs pushed it to a $4 million net loss. The Seattle-based online real estate company, which on...
Amazon has 12 Disaster Relief hubs around the world — including this one in California handling wildfire relief supplies — designed to respond quickly to natural disasters with delivery of emergency materials. (Amazon Photo) Amazon’s Disaster Relief team responds with emergency supplies to...
Google’s Kirkland Urban campus in Kirkland, Wash. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Google is laying off 52 employees in Washington state, according to a state filing released Wednesday. The job cuts include software engineers, engineering and product managers, mechatronics engineers,...
Google veterans leaving to launch Discovery Loop, from left: Oriol Vinyals, Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff Dean, and Quoc Le. (Discovery Loop Photo) Speaking in June at the University of Washington Allen School commencement, AI pioneer Jeff Dean told computer science graduates how he “got the itch to...
Older ferries like this vessel sailing across Washington’s Puget Sound are scheduled to be upgraded or replaced with electric-hybrid ferries to cut greenhouse emissions. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) The sun is setting on Washington state’s aging diesel-powered ferry fleet as work begins on...
Comedian and “Love Isn’t Blind” host Allison Goldberg, center in pink, during the touring live show. (Photo via Love Isn’t Blind) Can’t a tech bro catch a break? A live dating show that has made stops in Seattle sheds a little bit of light on how tech workers in the city are received,...
Zillow Group’s headquarters at 1301 Second Ave. in downtown Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo) Zillow Group’s layoffs will eliminate 91 jobs in Washington state, landing heavily on senior staff, according to a notice the company filed with the state Employment Security Department. The filing...
Prompted by GeekWire to create three separate children’s stories about animals — a bear, a bird and a cat — Google Gemini Storybook rendered three male characters. A new UW study dives much deeper into AI models’ gendering of animal characters. (Google Gemini Images) A bear is almost certainly a...
Investors and innovators at the kickoff happy hour at 2026 Pacific Northwest Climate Week. (GeekWire Photos / Laura Scott) Subscribe to Positive Charge: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, All Episodes Most climate news these days is grim. But at a rooftop happy hour...
A Falcon 9 rocket arcs into the night sky during a February 2023 launch. Most of SpaceX’s launches carry Starlink satellites built at the company’s factory in Redmond, Wash. (SpaceX Photo, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0) The satellites rolling off the line in Redmond, Wash., are paying for Elon...
GeekWire Illustration Seattle-based online real estate company Zillow Group laid off more than 500 employees Tuesday, about 7% of its global workforce, its second and largest round of cuts this year. The layoffs are about “ensuring we have a disciplined cost structure and getting more...
Teri Hatfield. (LinkedIn Photo) — Teri Hatfield was named chief revenue officer for Iterable, a customer engagement platform. The Seattle-area tech executive most recently served as executive vice president of sales and solutions at Salesforce and CRO of Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in...
Jyoti Shukla, chief product and technology officer at KEXP, inside the live room at the Seattle radio station. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle indie radio powerhouse KEXP has hired tech veteran Jyoti Shukla as its first chief product and technology officer, with an unusual mandate in...
GeekWire Illustration Microsoft and Amazon both saw their stocks surge again Monday, riding a post-earnings tech wave across the stock market that pushed Amazon past $3 trillion in value for the first time. The gains follow earnings reports last week in which both companies’ cloud platforms...