University of Washington leaders are weighing whether to separate the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering from the broader College of Engineering, after a task force recommended the move as part of proposed changes to UW’s computing and AI programs.

The split would give new independence to what has become one of the world’s leading schools for computer science and AI, and a major source of talent for the Seattle region’s tech industry.

As an independent, college-level school, the Allen School would gain greater control over its finances and a seat at the table with UW’s other deans. It could also put more of its own revenue toward teaching, as student demand for computing courses continues to outstrip its capacity.

The task force’s report, released this week, concluded that UW’s successes in computing, data science and AI have come “not because of the organizational structures we have in place but in spite of them.” The nine-member group included UW faculty leaders from across campus, two outside academics and an Amazon executive.

The report also described a “difficult relationship” between the Allen School and the College of Engineering, and “significant distrust” across campus over resources and priorities.

UW Engineering Dean Nancy Allbritton, in a statement to GeekWire on Tuesday, called the relationship “complex rather than difficult.”

The College of Engineering supports the university’s decision to “carefully evaluate” the task force’s recommendations, Allbritton said. She praised the Allen School and said the school and college share a long history of working together, with a commitment to students, research and service to Washington state.

The stakes extend well beyond university politics: The Allen School’s graduates are in high demand across the tech industry. Nearly 100 graduates from the 2025-26 class went to work full time at Amazon, and more than 70 went to Google, Microsoft or Meta, according to a survey of recent graduates by the school. In all, graduates went to more than 150 different companies.

No decision yet: UW President Robert J. Jones and Provost Tricia Serio said Monday that they aren’t making a decision yet. In a letter to the UW community, they announced two implementation committees.

• One committee will plan for a possible independent Allen School, including its finances. The letter calls the continued strength and growth of the College of Engineering “a central consideration.”
• The other will develop plans for a new campus-wide “Federation of Information, Computing and Society,” which would coordinate computing, data science and AI work across UW, including fundraising, and hold its own funding for hiring across departments.

Both committees are due to report by the end of winter quarter 2027, and UW leaders plan to announce next steps in spring 2027. Any changes would still need approval through the university’s usual processes, including the Faculty Senate and Board of Regents, with a goal of putting them in place by the end of the 2027-28 academic year.

The task force was co-chaired by Andy Connolly of UW’s eScience Institute and Kathy Yelick of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Its other members were Dan Grossman, now the Allen School’s interim director; Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau of the University of Wisconsin; UW’s Elizabeth Nance (chemical engineering), Abel Rodriguez (statistics), Emma Spiro (Information School) and Peter Tarczy-Hornoch (UW Medicine); and Anne Szeto of Amazon.

Allen School faculty voted 83-0 in late September in support of “moving forward with a process to determine how the Allen School would become an independent school,” with 13 not voting because they were absent or on leave, according to the school. A formal decision and vote would follow that process, the school said.

Budget and a seat at the table: The issue comes down to money and influence. UW’s budget model sends tuition and a share of research grant funding to the college where the courses are taught and the research is based.

For the Allen School, that’s the College of Engineering. As an independent school, the Allen School would control those funds directly, and its leader would sit with UW’s other deans when the university sets strategy on AI and other priorities, a voice the task force says computing has largely lacked.

UW’s Information School already operates as an independent, college-level unit. But the report says its focus on the human, societal and organizational side of computing and information is different from the Allen School’s focus on computing as a discipline.

As an initial step, Jones and Serio invited Grossman to participate in the Board of Deans and Chancellors. The letter says the move is “independent of any future decision about administrative structure.”

In a message to the Allen School community, Grossman called the invitation “a reflection of the Allen School’s scale and reach,” adding, “I’m pleased to have this opportunity to make meaningful contributions to discussions among UW’s leaders.”

He described the task force’s proposals as “exciting recommendations that will be great for the whole of UW and its impact on Washington state and beyond.”

Grossman also said there are “no planned changes to the Allen School’s structure, staffing, budget, policies and procedures, or degree programs” while the committees do their work.

A longtime Allen School professor and its former vice director, Grossman was named interim director this summer when Magdalena Balazinska’s nearly seven-year term as director ended. At the time, UW said it was opting for an interim leader for about a year while it weighed the task force’s recommendations, which hadn’t yet been made public.

The board seat was one of several early steps the task force recommended to show that UW was committed to the process. The task force also suggested having the Allen School’s director report jointly to the provost and giving the school more control over its budget, but UW hasn’t taken those steps for now.

Rooted in Paul Allen’s gift: The prospect of independence goes back to the Allen School’s creation in 2017.

When a $40 million gift from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen turned UW’s longtime computer science department into the Allen School, the gift agreement said the school would “remain a unit of the College of Engineering, at least for the time being,” according to a copy obtained by GeekWire.

The agreement called for the school to receive the same prominence, visibility, support and privileges as UW’s other schools and colleges “to the greatest extent possible,” and anticipated that it could someday become “a free-standing School or College.”

The agreement also spelled out what would happen to the name if the school were ever “elevated to a College of the University”: it would change to reflect the new structure, but would “always prominently include” Allen’s name.

Impact on Engineering: The College of Engineering would lose its largest unit. The Allen School, which awarded 894 of the college’s 3,132 degrees in 2025-26, accounts for a little more than a quarter of the college by degrees, enrollment and faculty, according to figures from the college.

The report acknowledges “significant short- and long-term financial implications” from a separation and suggests options such as permanent financial support for Engineering to offset the loss.

Allbritton said the college is committed to helping shape an outcome that “strengthens the College of Engineering, strengthens computer science as an independent discipline, and advances the University of Washington’s broader mission of innovation, discovery, economic opportunity and public impact.”

The Allen School “is an extraordinary unit that has experienced remarkable growth and operates at a scale unlike any other department in the College,” she said. “As both organizations have evolved, there have naturally been questions about structure, governance, and how best to support future growth.”

She also noted that the College of Engineering has nearly doubled in size over the past decade “amid increasingly constrained public resources,” and said the college’s focus is on ensuring that students, faculty, staff, research partnerships and industry relationships “continue to thrive.”

“What has remained constant is a shared commitment to student success, research excellence and service to Washington state,” Allbritton said.

The report doesn’t detail the friction between the Allen School and Engineering. It says independence “does not directly address concerns voiced about collegiality” but could remove “a structural asymmetry that has complicated those relationships.” Opinion across campus on Allen’s independence was “genuinely divided,” the report says.

The federation’s role: The proposed federation is partly a way to keep the rest of campus on board. Other units worried that the Allen School would win independence while the federation never got real resources, according to the report, which recommends that the split not be finalized until the federation is up and running.

Much of the “distrust” cited in the report centers on whether one recommendation would advance at the expense of the other.

If the Allen School’s separation is finalized first, the report says, “other stakeholders are unlikely to trust that the federation will ever achieve the size and stature it needs.”

If the federation moves ahead without a clear commitment to independence, the Allen School and its supporters “are unlikely to trust that their important contributions toward the federation’s success will achieve meaningful change.”

The Allen School is already helping lead cross-campus efforts, including a new AI minor for students in all majors, developed with 18 academic units and set to launch in spring 2027.

Toward a college of computing: Other top universities have taken similar paths. Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech run computer science as standalone, college-level schools, while MIT, UC Berkeley and Cornell have created broader colleges of computing, according to the report.

Peer institutions’ computing colleges were “frequently propelled by a transformational naming gift,” the report notes, as with MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing and Cornell’s Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

The report describes the federation as a possible “transitional phase” toward a full College of Computing at UW, which would house the Allen School alongside other units, and recommends revisiting that idea in about five years.

Correction: An earlier version of this story overstated the Allen School’s size relative to the rest of the College of Engineering. The story has been updated with figures from the college.

The University of Washington’s College of Engineering has received a $12 million gift from a semiconductor company whose chairman earned a master’s degree from the school more than 45 years ago.

The donation is from Winbond Electronics Corporation America, a U.S. subsidiary of Taiwan-based Winbond Electronics Corp. Arthur Y.C. Chiao is Winbond’s chairman and CEO and has been with the company since 1987. He earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the UW in 1980.

The gift will create the Winbond Endowed Fund for Excellence in the College of Engineering to support student scholarships, faculty recruitment and retention, research and interdisciplinary collaboration.

“Arthur Chiao’s vision, leadership and lifelong commitment to the University of Washington make this gift especially meaningful,” Nancy Albritton, dean of the College of Engineering, said in a statement.

Chiao envisions the new fund “as a catalyst for breakthrough discoveries” that will allow the college to “pursue bold initiatives and respond to evolving opportunities in engineering, technology and fields of future strategic importance,” according to a UW release. That includes semiconductors, AI, quantum tech and advanced manufacturing.

The College of Engineering is among the UW’s largest colleges, enrolling 10,136 students last fall and employing a faculty of 350. The college says it is the fifth-largest producer of electrical and computer engineering graduates in the U.S.

“Seattle is a gateway to the Pacific Northwest of North America, and the University of Washington will play an important role in connecting future technology innovation between North America and East Asia,” Chiao said.

The gift comes amid a push to bring chipmaking closer to home. Taiwan is the global center of manufacturing for the most advanced semiconductor chips, and the United States has been working to reduce its dependence on East Asian chip production. In 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act to incentivize domestic fabrication, R&D work and workforce training.

Foundations, the startup community with hubs in Seattle and San Francisco, launched a service Tuesday that lets businesses contract with its members — many of them technical founders building companies of their own — to plan, develop and implement AI systems and applications.

The service, called Foundations Design and Engineering, is designed in part to give those founders a new way to pay their bills as early-stage investment gets harder to raise. It also reflects how AI is changing tech, making software easier to build and leading some startups to act more like services firms, customizing their work for individual customers.

“I think the world of traditional consulting and startups is just absolutely going to merge,” said Aviel Ginzburg, the Seattle venture capitalist who co-founded Foundations in 2024.

Except, in the case of Foundations Design and Engineering, the consulting won’t have the trappings of the traditional kind, he said. There is no staff of consultants and no billing by the hour. Work is priced by the project.

The pitch on the website: “Not consultants studying AI. Builders using it every day.”

The idea, he said, is to create something that “acts more like a router.” A request from a business might go to a member company already building a product in that area, a founder who knows the customer’s industry, or an early-stage founder looking for paid work.

Ginzburg said the work could have another benefit, giving founders a close look at the problems businesses are trying to solve, which can help them decide what to build.

The initials, FDE, are a play on “forward deployed engineer,” the term for engineers who embed with a customer to get technology working inside its business. Palantir popularized the role, and companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon have adopted it.

Some of the details have yet to be determined. For example, Foundations is still working out how much of each contract it will keep. Ginzburg said it will vary case by case, from nothing to a double-digit percentage. Also unsettled is whether a business will sign its contract with Foundations or directly with the founder doing the work.

Prices aren’t set. In terms of a starting point, Ginzburg said founders in the community have charged $1,000 to $2,000 to spend a couple of hours with a company’s team and as much as $5,000 for an audit of how a business could use AI, with larger projects varying widely.

Foundations Design and Engineering has its roots in a group of 10 founders who were already doing consulting work and helped put the offering together. Foundations opened the service to the rest of its members Tuesday morning. A veteran Seattle startup founder will run FTE part time at first. (Ginzburg said he wasn’t ready to announce who the person is.)

Foundations counts more than 300 founders in its community, including about 30 in its founder-in-residence program. It is a public benefit corporation, a legal structure for companies that aim to turn a profit while also serving a public purpose.

It doesn’t take equity in the startups that go through the residency program, and Ginzburg said the new service is meant to bring in revenue without pulling the organization away from its mission of making founders successful.

“This is a startup,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes, but it’s going to be fun.”

In a cramped corner workspace in a mechanical engineering building at the University of Washington, a team of students is working to harness the power of the sun.

They operate on a fraction of the budget of elite international programs, fitting build hours around class schedules and other extracurriculars. Yet this summer, the scrappy crew took their handmade, solar-powered car — dubbed Sakura — out of the shop and onto the open road.

Over seven days in July and 1,778 miles from Minnesota to Texas, they outpaced nearly every competitor to finish fourth overall and cross the line as the top-ranking American team in the American Solar Challenge.

Now entering its fourth year, the Solar Vehicle Team at UW (SVTUW) is still a relative newcomer to collegiate solar racing. Officially affiliated with the university’s Mechanical Engineering Department, the roughly 50-person group has evolved into a broader interdisciplinary effort spanning electrical engineering, computer science, business, aerodynamics, and more.

Operated entirely by undergrads, the club handles every aspect of the operation in-house — from sponsor outreach and logistics to hands-on fabrication.

While top international competitors rely on multi-million dollar budgets and years of development, the Huskies assembled their vehicle (named after the Japanese word for cherry blossom) in just 11 months — a lightning-fast turnaround for a machine built entirely from scratch.

For team president Rudy Heredia-Jantz, an electrical and computer engineering senior, even making it to the starting line felt like a triumph.

“Frankly, we have no idea [how we pulled it off],” Heredia-Jantz said. “This car — it was a little bit of a miracle. We did not have it up and running until the day before we left for competition. We didn’t even have it moving. We just spun the rear motor, threw it in the trailer, and figured we’ll blow something up eventually.”

Things did indeed blow up — 12 tires in total along the way — but the Huskies kept rolling. For a third-year program competing against seasoned international juggernauts, simply keeping the car on the road was an achievement; outpacing them was a statement.

UW didn’t just survive the route to Texas — they blew past expectations for a young club, clinching the Aesthetics Award and Spirit of the Event Award alongside their top-four finish.

For second-year mechanical engineering student Elijah Yan, who serves as the team’s mechanical lead, the learning curve was immediate.

“Building a car is just not something I’ve done before, so it’s very new to me, and it’s super cool to learn that type of stuff — suspension stuff, how to do vehicle dynamics,” Yan said.

That hands-on engineering paid off when Sakura hit highway speeds on open pavement. Designed to maximize efficiency, the ultra-lightweight vehicle — weighing roughly 500 pounds with a driver inside — stretches 19 feet long to fit its array of solar panels while keeping its profile as narrow as possible.

Under the hood, Sakura is a blend of precision engineering and strict energy conservation:

• Solar array: 386 Maxeon Gen 7 photovoltaic cells covering six square meters, producing up to 1,540 watts of max power output directly from sunlight.
• Battery pack: A student-built 5.125 kWh lithium-ion battery in a 36S9P cell configuration (121V nominal), supplemented by a secondary backup battery used solely for system startups.
• Drivetrain and motor: Powered by a 2 kW Mitsuba 2096-III hub motor capable of pushing the 500-pound vehicle up to 65 mph on open highways.
• Data and cockpit: A custom steering wheel equipped with push-to-talk comms, digital telemetry displays, and regenerative braking controls, paired with an onboard Samsung Galaxy smartphone that streams real-time battery and motor analytics back to the pit crew.

To pull off a competitive build on a shoestring budget, the team combined its resourcefulness with local industry support. The vehicle’s lightweight frame, for instance, relies on carbon fiber sandwich panel flooring donated by Boeing, held together with specialized fiberglass tape.

“It’s the perks of being a Seattle-based team — we work with some amazing materials,” Heredia-Jantz said.

Yet even with aerospace-grade composites, bringing a prototype car across the finish line required plenty of improvised shop hustle.

“The car is held together with cardboard and duct tape, essentially,” Yan joked.

And managing the technical hardware on the road is as much a game of data processing as it is driving.

During the race, a dedicated strategy team monitors Sakura‘s health in real time. Using a custom dashboard that feeds off the onboard smartphone’s data stream, students track battery state-of-charge, individual array voltages, and motor temperatures from a trailing support vehicle.

By pairing live telemetry with incoming weather forecasts, the crew calculates optimal cruise speeds on the fly — relaying instructions to the driver via walkie-talkie so they can balance energy consumption, leverage regenerative braking, and avoid tripping the battery’s protection systems on steep climbs or hard accelerations.

That real-time power management was also put to the test right before the cross-country journey, when the team competed in the Formula Sun Grand Prix — an annual three-day track race where cars run on a single initial charge and whatever sunlight they can harvest along the way. Despite navigating a track that pushed their power distribution system to its limits, the track time gave the team crucial baseline data and momentum before taking on the road race.

Now the club is already preparing for its next evolution. While repairing Sakura for upcoming competitions, students are designing their next-generation vehicle from scratch — overhauling power distribution, reinforcing the chassis, and building a new solar array.

For a club building sun-powered technology in a city known for grey skies, the project is ultimately driven by something deeper than weather.

“I believe this team is building something special in the early morning hours on UW’s campus: talent that shows up before sunrise, a refusal to wait for better resources before doing great work, and a stubbornness that looks a lot like faith,” said Caoilin Krathaus, the team’s administrative lead. “It reminds me of the story behind Boys in the Boat, and what I’ve always thought of as the true Husky experience.”

Goldman Sachs is expanding its technology presence in the Seattle region, opening a new Bellevue engineering center that will accommodate more than 125 employees focused on artificial intelligence and cloud transformation.

The New York-based financial giant held a ribbon-cutting ceremony this month for the new office, its first dedicated space for engineers in the Pacific Northwest.

The Bellevue location adds to Goldman Sachs’ existing presence in downtown Seattle, where the company has maintained an office since 2001 for its banking and wealth management divisions.

“We are in a period of rapid technological change, but we know our people are still this firm’s greatest asset,” Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon said in a statement. “Hiring exceptional talent is central to how we adapt and grow.”

The move also puts Goldman Sachs in the company of a growing list of financial and technology companies that have established engineering operations in the Seattle area. GeekWire maintains a list of nearly 150 engineering hubs in the Seattle region here.

JPMorgan Chase established its Seattle Tech Center in 2018 and has steadily expanded it. The engineering hub has grown to about 400 employees and is now anchoring a new AI infrastructure team focused on controlling how the bank runs AI across its own data centers and outside cloud providers.

Goldman Sachs said its new Bellevue location comes amid growth at other facilities in Dallas, Salt Lake City and Warsaw. Earlier this month, the company hired Dinesh Keswani — a former Microsoft and GoDaddy engineering leader — to co-lead its core engineering team alongside Gopi Parameswaran. Keswani will also serve as chief technology officer of The Core Engineering.