— Agility Robotics named Michael Beer as its chief financial officer. Current CFO and chief operating officer Jennifer Hunter will transition to serving exclusively as COO.

“Michael brings outstanding public company finance and capital markets experience, while Jennifer, with her prior experience as a publicly traded COO, will focus exclusively on scaling our operational excellence and manufacturing capabilities,” said CEO Peggy Johnson, in a statement.

The Salem, Ore.-based startup, whose two-legged Digit robots have been tested inside Amazon warehouses, is set to become the first publicly traded U.S. company dedicated solely to humanoid robots, the company announced last month.

Beer joins Agility Robotics from the California energy storage company Energy Vault, where he was CFO for two years. Past roles include venture partner at Vest Coast Capital and CFO at FreeWire Technologies.

— Seattle-area tech veteran Matt Fisher has taken the role of CTO for London-based Efekta Education. The company is developing an agentic teaching and learning platform.

“I’ve spent my career building technologies that help people learn, connect and achieve more. What attracted me to Efekta is its clear vision for using AI to enhance learning, support teachers and
make high-quality education accessible to more people around the world,” Fisher said.

Last August, Fisher joined immersive media startup Adventr as a late-stage co-founder. Prior to that, he was co-founder and CTO at Daydream, a startup that raised a $50 million seed round last year to shake up the way people find and buy clothing online. Other past roles include leadership at Amazon, Microsoft, Nordstrom and Auth0.

— There is another name to add to the raft of departures from Microsoft‘s security leadership.

Rahul Prakash, head of product for Microsoft Security Copilot, shared that he’s leaving his role after nearly a decade with the company.

“As any Identity professional will tell you, the world of [Identity Access Management] is far more intricate than people realize, and it’s being rewritten for the world of AI agents. At Microsoft, I’ve had the privilege of going deep into this space…” Prakash said on LinkedIn.

On Monday, GeekWire reported that Rudra “Rudy” Mitra, who spent more than 27 years at Microsoft, was joining Amazon Web Services as vice president of security services. Other recent departures include Krishna Kumar Parthasarathy, who resigned at after nearly three decades.

— Nancy Lipson has joined Zap Energy as chief legal officer. The Everett, Wash.-based company is in pursuit of fusion energy, and recently expanded its scope to include next generation nuclear fission.

Lipson was previously executive vice president and CLO for the gold mining giant Newmont Corporation, departing after 18 years in 2023.

“Nancy’s deep expertise in areas of corporate strategy, governance, compliance, and sustainability will be key assets as Zap pursues its integrated approach to advanced nuclear,” Zap posted on LinkedIn.

— Jyoti Shukla was named chief product and technology officer at KEXP, a nonprofit radio station serving Seattle and the Bay Area. The station includes community and performance spaces, and features wide-ranging music genres.

“There is a lot of meaningful work ahead, and I’m excited to keep learning, building, and partnering with an amazing team as we shape what’s next,” Shukla said on LinkedIn.

Prior to taking the role, Shukla served on KEXP’s board of directors and was senior vice president of product design at SiriusXM. She has also worked in tech leadership roles at Nordstrom and Starbucks, and started her career at Microsoft.

— ZEV Co-op, a Washington-based nonprofit EV carshare cooperative, announced Ry Armstrong as its new executive director. Armstrong was previously at Sustainable Seattle, where they served as co-director. 

— Tirzah VanDamme has joined Gagen MacDonald as senior director of AI and digital transformation. She brings more than 20 years of experience and was most recently at Microsoft.

— The Washington State Academy of Sciences (WSAS) announced the election four new board members. They are:

• Amanda Boyd, executive director of Native American Programs and Professor in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine at Washington State Universit
• Mary Czerwinski, former research manager at Microsoft Research
• John Stein, former science and research director of NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center
• Judith Wasserheit, professor emerita of Global Health, Medicine, and Epidemiology at the University of Washington

WSAS also elected 30 new members, who will assist the organization in providing scientific and technical information to state policymakers.

They include 26 scientists and engineers elected by their WSAS peers and four members recently elected to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, or Medicine or awarded the Nobel Prize and who reside or work in Washington state.

The members include 11 UW professors and eight from WSU, five researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, three from Fred Hutch Cancer Center, and three at private companies, with some participants holding roles at multiple institutions.

Microsoft is putting $60 million behind the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a push to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific research across the government’s 17 national labs.

The company’s investment is split into two pieces: $40 million in Azure cloud computing and AI credits over three years, and $20 million for engineering and deployment help to get DOE researchers actually using the tools, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.

Microsoft is also launching a new internal group called SPARK — Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge — to serve as the single point of contact between the company and DOE on Genesis Mission work. It’s meant to combine Microsoft’s program management, engineering, security and research teams into one coordinated effort, instead of leaving individual labs to navigate Microsoft on their own.

President Trump created the Genesis Mission through an executive order in November 2025, directing DOE to build a unified computing and data platform — since named the American Science and Security Platform — that connects the national labs’ supercomputers, AI tools and scientific datasets.

The order likened the effort’s urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project, and the White House said it’s expanded into a whole-of-government initiative involving more than 15 federal agencies, backed by more than $5 billion in commitments.

Microsoft named four initial projects taking shape under the partnership, including work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., to speed up the discovery of new energy storage materials — cutting analysis that used to take years down to weeks — and autonomous lab work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed at detecting biological threats earlier.

“We move faster together,” Chris Barry, president of Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector business, wrote in the blog post announcing the commitment, framing the investment as both a “national security imperative” and economic opportunity for the U.S.

Microsoft isn’t the only Seattle-area cloud giant courting the Genesis Mission. Amazon Web Services was recognized by DOE as a Genesis Mission supporter in December, highlighting its work with Idaho National Laboratory on AI tools for nuclear reactor design, and the company launched its own Genesis Accelerator Initiative in February, offering up to $50 million in cloud credits for DOE-related research over three years.

Google also announced Wednesday that it was committing $40 million of AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers in support of the Genesis Mission.

General Fusion’s stock is trading up after it became the first fusion energy company to go public on a major exchange, debuting Monday on Nasdaq.

The launch of GFUZ stock coincided with the release of the Fusion Industry Association’s annual report, which reflected that same investor enthusiasm: private funding for fusion companies totaled $4.5 billion over the past 12 months. One of the biggest rounds went to Helion Energy, a Seattle-area company that raised $465 million last month, bringing its total investment to $1.5 billion.

Soaring energy demand from AI data centers has helped drive interest in the sector as an ambitious slate of companies is building devices that create and contain plasma — a super-hot, fourth state of matter required for atom-smashing fusion to occur.

For decades, researchers have chased this clean energy source, aiming to replicate the reactions that power the sun, a churning ball of plasma. While significant progress has been made, big technical hurdles remain, and it’s uncertain when the goal will be reached.

But the promise of fusion is so enticing that the risks appear worth it for many investors.

“A commercial fusion industry is a world-changing industry, and the returns on investment will be massive,” said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, in the foreword to the report.

The sector has landed more than $13.3 billion from venture capitalists over the past five years, according to the annual survey. After decades of government support via national labs and R&D grants, the private sector is now picking up the majority of the tab for fusion’s progress.

One of the important milestones in the pursuit of fusion is “scientific breakeven” — the point at which the output of a fusion reaction matches the energy input to a device’s plasma, without including the rest of the system’s power needs. Scientific breakeven was first hit by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2022, but has not been reached by a private venture.

To be financially viable, the fusion companies need to go further, capturing more energy from fusion than required to operate their whole system.

The new report includes profiles of 56 companies worldwide that are pursuing fusion, including four based in the Pacific Northwest: General Fusion, Helion, Zap Energy and Avalanche Energy, as well as Kyoto Fusioneering, which has an office in Seattle.

Here’s a closer look at the four companies based in this region:

Avalanche Energy, Seattle

• Notable fact: Avalanche is unusual for its small-scale approach to fusion, and its plan to launch a pilot plant by 2030 is among the earlier targets in the race.
• Year founded: 2018
• Target uses: Electricity, space propulsion, marine propulsion, off-grid energy
• Publicly shared total funding: $104.2 million
• Target for scientific break even: 2029
• Target for first pilot plant: 2030

General Fusion, Vancouver, B.C.

• Notable fact: General Fusion has made multiple pivots in recent years in its path to commercialization and was the first to go public.
• Year founded: 2002
• Target uses: Electricity generation
• Publicly shared total funding: about $500 million
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed; aiming to produce fusion conditions by 2028
• Target for first pilot plant: Approximately 2035

Helion, Everett, Wash.

• Notable fact: Helion was the first to sign up a fusion customer when it inked a deal with Microsoft in 2023, and aims to be the first to reach commercialization.
• Year founded: 2013
• Target uses: Electricity generation
• Publicly shared total funding: $1.5 billion
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed
• Target for first pilot plant: 2028

Zap Energy, Everett, Wash.

• Notable fact: Zap recently announced it will also pursue nuclear fission energy, building small-scale reactors alongside its fusion work.
• Year founded: 2017
• Target uses: Electricity generation, off-grid energy, industrial heat
• Publicly shared total funding: $338 million
• Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed
• Target for first pilot plant: Late 2030s

Seattle-area startups raised $2.7 billion in venture funding through the first half of 2026, across 163 deals, down about 40% from $4.5 billion in 210 deals during the same period a year ago.

The figures come from the recently released PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report for Q2 2026. The decline in capital reflects fewer deals across the board in the Seattle region, with much of the funding going to a handful of large rounds for energy, cybersecurity, and space startups.

Here is the region’s top 5 for the second quarter, as tracked in the report:

• Helion Energy’s $465 million Series G round was the biggest deal of the quarter.
• Starcloud raised $170 million for space-based data centers.
• XBOW pulled in $155 million for autonomous cybersecurity systems.
• Starfish Space closed about $110 million for spacecraft servicing.
• Gradial raised $65 million for its agentic enterprise software platform.

Against the AI grain: In Q2 2026 specifically, startups in the Seattle area closed 85 deals totaling $1.5 billion. That was down from 101 deals and $2.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago, but up from Q1 2026, which PitchBook revised to 78 deals and $1.2 billion as part of its regular data updates.

Heavy infrastructure investments by Microsoft and Amazon have helped to establish the Seattle area as an AI hub, but the region’s pure-play AI startups, on the whole, aren’t seeing investment on the same scale as some of their peers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the country.

That creates a disconnect with the larger U.S. venture capital market. AI companies accounted for 86% of all U.S. venture dollars in the first half of the year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA data.

Nationally, it was a record half: U.S. startups raised $412.7 billion through June, already surpassing the full-year record of $358.6 billion set in 2021. But the number is misleading. Deals of $100 million or more accounted for 87.5% of the total, and AI companies captured 86 cents of every venture dollar.

OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed roughly 43% of all global venture capital in the first half of the year, by one estimate. The Bay Area, home to both, pulled in $319 billion, about three times its H1 2025 total.

Strip out those two companies and the national picture looks very different. Seed funding fell 27% nationally in the first half, and first-time fund formation is on pace for its lowest year since 2016.

Regional trends: In that way, what’s happening in the Seattle area reflects the current realities of the market. However, the region is also slipping relative to its peers in the latest numbers.

Among the 10 largest U.S. metro areas for venture funding, Seattle ranked seventh by capital invested in the first half of the year, down from fifth in H1 2025. By deal count, the region was last in the top 10.

The data used in this analysis covers the Seattle-Tacoma combined statistical area (CSA), a broader regional boundary that includes communities beyond the core metro region.

Political climate: Washington’s shifting tax and economic landscape adds another variable.

The state now taxes capital gains at up to 9.9%, a new millionaires’ tax takes effect in 2028, and legislators this year floated taxing the federal QSBS exemption that startup founders and early employees rely on when they sell shares at exit. That bill didn’t pass, but generated enough alarm to cause a backlash from startup community leaders and investors.

Looking ahead: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based space company, is reportedly seeking up to $10 billion in what would be its first outside funding round. A deal that size would be larger than every other Seattle-area venture round this year combined.

British Columbia-based General Fusion on Friday completed its deal to become first publicly traded fusion stock on a major exchange. The 24-year-old company is trying to harness the atom-smashing reactions that power the sun, aiming to create commercially viable amounts of electricity — a feat no one has yet accomplished.

General Fusion closed its merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III, allowing it to go public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The companies first announced the $1 billion agreement in January, months after layoffs and a public plea by its CEO for new investment.

Its shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange Monday under the ticker symbol GFUZ, and its warrants under GFUZW.

Last month, the company announced a partnership with energy infrastructure company Renexia to begin planning commercial deployment of its clean energy systems in Italy, though significant technical hurdles remain.

Editor’s note: General Fusion is set to become the first publicly traded pure-play fusion energy company on a major exchange. In late 2025, Renewal Fuels, which has been trading on OTC markets for more than a decade, agreed to acquire Kepler Fusion Technologies in a reverse merger. The transaction closed in February 2026, and the combined company has rebranded as American Fusion.

— Mike Torres, a former executive at Amazon, Microsoft and Google, has joined Dropbox as the company’s first chief product officer.

“As a product leader, joining a company that helped pioneer product-led growth is energizing…” Torres said on LinkedIn. “In this role, my focus will be simple: help Dropbox ship the right things at the right time for our customers.”

Seattle-based Torres comes to Dropbox from Google, where he served as vice president of product for Chrome. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Amazon, most recently as VP of Kindle. At Microsoft, he led teams working on OneDrive, Windows Movie Maker and other products.

— T-Mobile appointed Chris Sambar as chief enterprise officer, effective no later than Oct. 14. Sambar will lead the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s small- and medium-sized business, enterprise and government units.

Sambar joins from Public Storage, where he serves as chief operating officer. He was previously at fellow communications giant AT&T for more than two decades, most recently as a president of the company’s global network organization overseeing architecture, engineering, construction, operations, tower strategy and program management.

“Chris is a seasoned wireless industry leader with proven experience including expanding high-growth businesses and seizing market opportunities,” said Srini Gopalan, CEO of T-Mobile.

T-Mobile made two additional C-suite changes:

Chief Business & Product Officer Mike Katz has resigned to “pursue new professional interests,” according to a press release. Katz was with the company for more than 28 years and will remain in a strategic advisory role through the end of the year. Gopalan offered his “sincere gratitude to Mike for his incredible contributions to T‑Mobile.” Read more about his departure in this GeekWire story.

André Almeida‘s C-suite role has expanded and his title has been updated to chief marketing, brand and broadband officer. He previously served as chief broadband, enterprise and emerging business officer. In the new position, Almeida will help oversee the company’s consumer wireless and broadband businesses.

— After 37 years with Microsoft, Xbox Vice President Kevin LaChapelle was among those laid off this week, with the cuts hitting the gaming division particularly hard as the company aims to overhaul the division.

LaChapelle was hired by the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant in 1989 as a software design engineer and joined the Xbox team in 2012.

“I will say my fondest memories are of leading the team of very talented engineers who built the Xbox Backward Compatibility program,” LaChapelle said on LinkedIn. When Phil Spencer, then head of Xbox, announced the program at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2015, LaChapelle added, “The audience’s reaction was unbelievable.”

— Adam Schoenfeld has resigned as chief marketing officer for Inflection.io. In April, the B2B marketing automation company acquired Keyplay, a Seattle startup co-founded and previously led by Schoenfeld. The deal reunited Schoenfeld and Inflection CEO Aaron Bird, who have known each other for many years and have collaborated and invested in each other’s companies.

Schoenfeld said on LinkedIn that he “had the best of intentions” when he committed to the acquisition, but then burnout hit him. “I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself. I dreaded telling the team. I didn’t want to bail and let people down… I’m sure others have been in this place,” he added. “After facing the hard conversations, I’m excited to look ahead.”

Schoenfeld remains a part-time CMO advisor for the business and also produces Adam’s GTM Report, which provides data-backed research, maps and tools for leaders and builders in the space.

— Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space Technologies named former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil to its board. Weil has held leadership roles at Planet, Meta, Instagram and Twitter and also serves on the boards of Cisco and The Nature Conservancy.

Stoke Space builds reusable rockets and raised $860 million from investors in its latest round. It’s No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Skippy Shaw has joined fusion startup Helion Energy as director of Washington government affairs. The Everett, Wash.-based company is working to build what could be the world’s first commercial fusion facility in Central Washington. Shaw joins Helion from The Nature Conservancy, where she led state governmental relations for TNC’s Washington chapter.

— David Langworthy announced that he has resigned from Microsoft after nearly 25 years, leaving the role of architect for Azure OpenAI. Langworthy, who worked as a founding member of Azure OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, GenAI, MAC, and Azure AI Services, is the founder and CTO of a stealth startup based in Bellevue.

— Carissa Allen has also left Microsoft, departing as director of strategy for the company’s events, including Ignite and AI Tour. On LinkedIn, Allen called her resignation after nearly 30 years “my Valiant Reboot Project (no “retirement” here) because you know I’m not finished yet.”

— And in case you missed it:

• Bill Colleran, a veteran technology executive who previously led Impinj, has joined Seattle-based AI coding startup Adronite as CEO. Edward Rothschild, who co-founded and previously led the company, is transitioning to chief technology officer. Read more in this GeekWire story.
• Nick Parker, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who led the company’s worldwide commercial sales business, is leaving to become Nvidia’s new sales chief, effective Aug. 24. Read more here.

AI data centers face mounting community backlash and local moratoriums, while surging power demands knock tech giants off course from their climate ambitions. Could fusion be the solution to both problems, and could two Seattle-area companies provide the fix?

Helion Energy is betting on it. The company signed an unprecedented agreement to sell fusion energy to Microsoft for a Central Washington data center. Armed with a $1.5 billion war chest, Helion is sprinting to reach its 2028 deadline to flip the switch on that power plant, which it hopes will be the world’s first to commercially produce electricity from fusion.

The soaring demand for clean energy is driving interest and investment, said David Kirtley, Helion’s CEO and co-founder. “It’s enabled us to ramp up our timelines and go faster than we had originally planned.”

Nearby, competitor Zap Energy has raised $330 million and secured Department of Energy backing. While ambitious, the startup is taking a more cautious approach. Zap recently announced it will jointly pursue fusion’s conventional cousin — nuclear fission — as a near-term revenue source and a hedge on its fusion bet.

“This isn’t a pivot,” said Benj Conway, Zap’s president and co-founder. “By integrating them into a single platform, we can move faster, reduce risk and build a more enduring company.”

Helion and Zap belong to a global cohort of entrepreneurs trying to harness the power of the sun. Their goal is to create a “star in a jar” here on Earth to produce nearly limitless clean energy. For decades, researchers have chased this milestone — and some believe the industry is finally getting close.

Inside Helion’s sprint to 2028

A visit to Helion starts with a gauntlet of security hurdles: getting past an outdoor guard in a booth, ID checks and stowing phones in locked cubbies. Inside its R&D space in Everett, Wash., Helion operates Polaris, a 60-foot-long, seventh-generation prototype that uses magnets to compress plasma, the super-hot state of matter required for fusion. Here is how it works:

• The Collision: The machine creates magnetic fields at both ends that launch and squeeze tiny blobs of plasma containing light atoms toward the center, where they collide at 1 million miles per hour.
• The Capture: As the ions fuse and release energy, the plasma expands against the magnetic field. This movement creates an electric current captured directly as electricity, similar to regenerative braking in electric vehicles.

The commercial device will ultimately run on isotopes of hydrogen and helium, and aims to reach temperatures of 200 million degrees Celsius — more than 10-times hotter than the center of the sun.

But significant technical hurdles remain. In July 2025, Helion broke ground on its 50-megawatt plant, Orion, in Malaga, Wash. The facility must be operational in two years to meet its contract with Microsoft.

Helion’s approach has been to build larger and larger prototypes as it advances its technology, but the company took a detour this spring to build a fusion device about one-eighth the size of Polaris.

“This is where we’re building the next smaller machine, Tiny Merge,” said Manav Singh, Helion’s director of electrical engineering, on a recent tour. “Step in, right here.”

Behind a massive Wizard of Oz-worthy curtain was the downsized, tubular fusion device. It bristled with metal protuberances that will connect it to power sources to send surges of electricity into the machine.

Tiny Merge could be viewed as a worrisome sign of backtracking to resolve technical issues. However, the company maintains its strategy always left room for smaller devices to allow for faster testing and iterations.

“There’s a few much more deep investigations we want to do,” Singh said. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

Zap’s dual core bet

A four-minute drive from Helion sits rival Zap Energy. The startup is building its technology on a physics phenomenon known as the Z-pinch, which uses a powerful electrical current to generate its own magnetic field to confine plasma.

Zap’s system operates through a distinct process:

• Plasma Generation: Hydrogen gas is injected into the device and blasted with energy, creating a 2-foot-long strand of plasma resembling a tame lightning bolt.
• Heat Absorption: When the Z-pinch triggers fusion, released neutrons are captured by a surrounding liquid metal blanket (bismuth in testing, lithium for commercial use).
• Power Generation: The neutrons carry intense heat, which is then converted into usable energy.

Zap is running three fusion devices that measure about 12 feet long, each focused on fine-tuning a specific challenge in its system.

Despite hitting key milestones, concerns about the timeline for reaching commercially-ready fusion triggered Zap’s move to add fission to its plans, making it the first fusion company to do so.

Zap is now working to deploy a 10-megawatt fission microreactor based on legacy Toshiba designs, giving it a more certain path to an operational power plant than fusion currently offers.

The company says the two strategies share technologies that could accelerate the development of both. A key technical overlap is the use of liquid metals; the fission device is cooled by liquid sodium, which behaves similarly to the liquid bismuth and lithium used in its fusion design.

“Fission gives us a path to deploy. Fusion gives us a path to transform,” Zap CEO Zabrina Johal, said in April. “Bringing them together is how we do both.”

A global clean energy race

More than 50 companies globally are pursuing fusion power, including two additional Pacific Northwest ventures: Seattle-based Avalanche Energy and British Columbia’s General Fusion.

Among the heavily funded contenders is Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Armed with nearly $3 billion, the company plans to build a plant in Virginia, home to the nation’s largest data center hub. China remains another major wildcard, investing billions of undisclosed dollars into its own domestic fusion ventures.

As work continues, enthusiasm grows alongside persistent skepticism. Some experts doubt cost-competitive fusion can ever be achieved, while others believe commercial viability is still decades away — too late to solve the immediate energy needs of the AI boom.

Laura Berzak Hopkins, deputy chief research officer at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, remains cautiously optimistic about the sector’s trajectory.

“We’ve made incredible progress, and we are reaching ever closer, but there still remain these major scientific and technological hurdles,” Berzak Hopkins said. However, she added, “new capabilities and new knowledge really bring us to this exciting cusp.”

Whether Helion and its peers will prove the skeptics wrong remains to be seen, but the data center energy crisis ensures the world will be watching.

Sources and references

Podcast interviews:

• David Kirtley, Helion Energy, CEO and co-founder
• Manav Singh, Helion Energy, director of electrical engineering 
• Matthew Thompson, Zap Energy, senior vice president of fission technology and former vice president of systems engineering and pulsed power
• Laura Berzak Hopkins, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, associate laboratory director for Strategy and Partnerships, and deputy chief research officer

GeekWire’s related coverage:

• Helion gives behind-the-scenes tour of secretive 60-foot fusion prototype as it races to deployment
• Helion makes big bet on ‘Tiny Merge’ fusion testbed to meet aggressive Microsoft timeline
• Inside Zap: Fusion pioneer tries to build ‘a star in a jar’ to unlock abundant clean energy
• Zap Energy’s nuclear double play: Fusion startup adds traditional fission to its lineup, in industry first

Amazon’s carbon footprint jumped 16% last year after several years of little or no increase. The company emitted nearly 80.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025. By comparison, that’s slightly higher than the nation of New Zealand’s emissions.

Amazon disclosed its climate-related data in its most comprehensive sustainability report to date, which includes a breakdown of its carbon sources, water use and other environmental impacts.

Not surprisingly, energy use showed the biggest rate of increase in the 2025 carbon tally as Amazon and other tech companies are working to rapidly expand their data center capacity to meet AI computing demand.

For the first time since 2019, the company also reported an uptick in its “carbon intensity” — a measure of how much carbon was emitted relative to each dollar of revenue. Amazon has promoted this metric as a sign that it can decouple its growth from its climate impacts.

Despite emissions moving in the wrong direction and ongoing data center-driven challenges, the Seattle-area company remains committed to its pledge of net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

When it comes to that goal, “I remain confident and optimistic in the overarching vision and the long-term progress we continue to make toward it,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, in the foreword to the company’s annual report.

The report highlights areas of success that include:

• Data center efficiency: Amazon’s data centers are 9% more efficient than the public cloud average and 30% more efficient than on-premises data centers at directing energy toward computing rather than cooling, lighting or overhead.
• Data center water use: Amazon is seven times more efficient in its water use than the industry average thanks to its use of air cooling at most sites, most of the year.
• 100% clean energy overall: For the third year running, Amazon matched its company-wide electricity use with an equivalent volume of purchased clean energy, although it technically still draws on fossil fuels for some of its energy.
• Electric vehicle fleet: It has the largest corporate EV fleet in North America, with more than 52,700 delivery vans worldwide. It’s halfway to meeting its 2030 goal of 100,000 EVs.

The company also reported improvements in reducing packaging and plastic use in delivered items; increasing use of low-carbon building materials in data center construction; and progress toward becoming water positive at its data centers, meaning it aims to replenish more water to communities than it uses.

The Amazon-backed Climate Pledge — an effort to get other organizations to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — has grown to 656 signatories after adding 107 companies this year. It marks a notable increase at a time when companies are growing quieter about climate commitments, with some stepping back from earlier goals.

But the surge in data center investment shows little sign of slowing, which will keep complicating Amazon’s path to lower emissions. CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon expects to spend a record $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, including “AI, chips, robotics, and low-Earth orbit satellites.”

Not all reactions to that buildout have been positive — even within the company. Members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice this month testified before the Seattle City Council in favor of data center requirements for renewable energy and labor protections, though Amazon doesn’t operate any data centers within city limits.

In response to the sustainability report, the employee group was critical of the increased emissions and accused the company of pressuring carbon accounting standards bodies — including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science-Based Targets Initiative — to adopt weaker rules.

More than 1,000 employees have signed an open letter drafted last year criticizing Amazon’s “warp-speed approach” to its AI development, the group added.

In the report, Amazon CSO Hurst acknowledged that AI-fueled advances could catalyze sustainability solutions or slow progress toward climate goals.

“But what alternative do we have,” she said, “but to continue to invest, learn, and move forward to try to solve one of the world’s most challenging issues?”

Editor’s note: Story updated at 11:56 a.m. with comment from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

As AI and surging demand for power collide with a warming planet, most climate and environmental news can feel a little hopeless — and for good reason. But some scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs are quietly betting that technology can still tip the balance.

Those are the stories we’re telling on Positive Charge, a new podcast launching today, hosted by GeekWire reporter Lisa Stiffler and independent Seattle-based audio producer and journalist Laura Scott. The show goes inside the companies and labs working on environmental solutions, and connects with the people living with the problems they’re trying to solve.

Our thanks to Amazon Sustainability for sponsoring this independent editorial project.

Two episodes are already live: The first explores the “forever chemicals” contaminating water around the world, and the companies that have figured out how to destroy them. The second is about the global race to make fusion energy real, and the startups betting they can deliver nearly limitless clean power. 

Future installments will explore new climate and sustainability breakthroughs every few weeks.

Subscribe to Positive Charge on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music, and find every episode at geekwire.com/positivecharge.