— Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang has suddenly left Microsoft after 21 years with the company, just months after landing the role in July. Her past roles include leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise.

Verge first reported the news on Friday, citing a memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma that did not disclose the reason for her departure.

An Xbox spokesperson was likewise mum on details. “We don’t discuss individual personnel matters. We’re grateful for Helen’s years of service and wish her well,” the company said in an email to GeekWire.

Xbox has undergone a massive reorganization that included Chiang’s appointment, roughly 3,200 job cuts through the fiscal year — about 20% of the Xbox workforce — the spinoff of four game studios and a plan to dramatically flatten management.

— Seattle-based tech leader Philip Su has joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff on beneficial deployments. The management role focuses on AI applications in global health, life sciences, economic mobility and education.

Su started his tech career with 12 years at Microsoft and later worked for Facebook. He has launched multiple ventures, including Audere, a global health software nonprofit, and Superphonic, a podcast player. In 2021, he worked at an Amazon fulfillment center to experience the holiday rush.

Su also created and leads an annual course for University of Washington computer science students on how to maximize their personal and professional growth.

— More leadership changes are underway at SeekOut, a Bellevue-based recruiting startup launched in 2017. The company announced Monday that co-founder John Tippett is now president, moving from his role as chief client officer.

In April, SeekOut CEO and co-founder Anoop Gupta retired and passed the reins to enterprise software veteran Sean Thompson. In August, co-founder and chief technology officer Aravind Bala took over as CEO. Thompson is now listed as an adviser to the board.

Tippett will lead day-to-day operations and work with Bala “on the company’s direction,” according to a press release. SeekOut said it wants to integrate AI tools into customers’ operations to reduce recruiters’ workload.

SeekOut is No. 68 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Michael (Mick) Merritt as vice president of strategy and partnerships, effective Dec. 7.

Merritt joins from Penn Medicine, where he was chief operating officer of Penn Signature Services. He has more than 25 years of experience in academic medicine, consulting, strategy, business development and operations.

— Industrial wastewater treatment startup Membrion has named Alexander Demihovsky as director of applications engineering. He joins the Seattle-based company from Xylem. His past employers include Evoqua Water Technologies and Bechtel National.

“Alex helps turn customer needs into viable project plans, mitigate execution risks and develop competitive proposals,” the company said.

Membrion is No. 160 on the GeekWire 200.

— Marine geothermal energy startup Endurance Energy has named Marty Calvert as the director of turbomachinery. Calvert joins the Seattle startup from Blue Origin. He was previously a turbomachinery engineer at NASA for more than 13 years.

Endurance completed its fifth deployment to the ocean floor last month, testing Adélie, a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin.

— Lattice Semiconductor, a Hillsboro, Ore.-based company, has added two directors to its board:

• Raejeanne Skillern, former VP and chief marketing officer of Amazon Web Services, who returns to Lattice after serving on the board from 2022 to 2024
• John McCool, senior vice president and special adviser to the CEO at Arista Networks

Anthropic’s IPO filing reads like a ledger of who’s getting paid in the AI boom. The Seattle region’s tech giants are on the list, but they aren’t at the top.

The prospectus, filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, details more than $750 billion in computing deals, including firm commitments and estimated future spending, and offers clues about what its founders and biggest investors stand to gain ahead of the company’s planned Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT.

Amazon and Microsoft have invested billions in Anthropic and won high-profile spending commitments from the Claude maker. But both trail Google, chipmaker Broadcom and Elon Musk’s SpaceX in their shares of Anthropic’s planned spending on computing power, the filing shows.

Following the compute money: Google’s chips are the biggest winner. Anthropic has lined up roughly $400 billion in computing capacity, mostly over the next seven years, based on Google-designed AI chips, known as tensor processing units or TPUs.

That total includes $114.5 billion to Google directly through July 2033, $161.2 billion in equipment leases with chipmaker Broadcom, and an estimated $125 billion to $150 billion in additional TPU capacity from 2028 to 2031.

Broadcom’s leases are the largest single arrangement in the filing. The five-year leases provide TPU-based hardware for data centers operated by other companies on Anthropic’s behalf.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is next. Anthropic agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion through 2029 for computing capacity from SpaceX’s AI subsidiary, formerly known as xAI, which runs a rival AI lab.

The filing says payments will reach about $3.1 billion a month once all the capacity is delivered, which Anthropic expects in December. The agreements run into 2029, though either side can cancel on 90 days’ notice after early 2027.

Amazon is still a big winner. Anthropic committed in April to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon Web Services over 10 years, through April 2036, and AWS Trainium is one of four chip families that Anthropic uses to train and run its models.

Microsoft’s piece is smaller, which reflects its later start. The company was aligned closely with OpenAI for years before striking its own deal with Anthropic.

Anthropic has committed to spend at least $44.9 billion on Microsoft’s Azure cloud from November 2026 through May 2033, the filing shows. That’s up from the $30 billion Azure deal announced in November 2025. The deal has been amended twice since, most recently this month.

Claude is built into Microsoft 365, and former Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell joined Anthropic’s board in February.

Two smaller providers have deals in the same range as Microsoft’s. Anthropic agreed to spend up to about $44.6 billion with Nscale, a U.K.-based AI infrastructure company, and about $41.3 billion with GPU cloud provider Lambda, both for capacity powered by Nvidia chips, according to the filing.

Will Anthropic need it all? Most of the commitments can’t be canceled, and the deals with Microsoft, Google and Amazon require Anthropic to pay “regardless of actual usage,” according to the filing.

So far, the demand is there. Anthropic’s revenue hit $11.6 billion in the second quarter, up from $787 million a year earlier, and the company posted its first operating profit, $974 million. It still had a $66.3 billion net loss, mostly from accounting charges tied to its soaring valuation.

The company says it has “consistently operated in a compute-constrained environment where customer demand exceeds available compute.”

Its compute commitments assume that demand keeps growing. Anthropic spent less than $2 billion a month on compute and infrastructure in the second quarter. The SpaceX deal alone is expected to cost about $3.1 billion a month at full capacity.

Paper fortunes: Amazon’s biggest payoff is its stake, which it valued at $190.4 billion as of June 30 in its quarterly SEC filing. That includes convertible notes with $6.2 billion in principal that Amazon valued at $97.9 billion. The notes would convert into stock, subject to a 12% ownership cap that Amazon can waive.

Amazon is scheduled to report third-quarter results Thursday, its first earnings report since Anthropic’s filing. The Seattle-based company has updated the value of its Anthropic holdings in each of its quarterly filings this year, so a new number could come this week.

Google put $10 billion into Anthropic’s latest funding round and can invest up to $20 billion more under a March financing deal. The filing doesn’t give ownership percentages for Amazon, Google or Microsoft. It says only that the three companies have each made “significant equity investments” in Anthropic.

Anthropic’s seven co-founders hold roughly 230 million to 245 million shares each, worth about $14 billion apiece at the latest private funding price. The company also gave its own Public Benefit Fund about 847 million shares, or 5% of its fully diluted stock as of June 30, worth about $50 billion at that price.

Anthropic could begin formally marketing its IPO to investors as soon as the week of Nov. 9, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. It is aiming to go public the following week, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company expects the offering to match or beat the size of SpaceX’s IPO, according to Bloomberg. SpaceX raised $75 billion in June, the largest IPO on record.

T-Mobile is introducing new wireless plans that change how customers get perks and phone deals, giving them a set number of “Picks” to spend on a new phone or an expanded menu of extras that they can swap out every 90 days.

The company says it will be the only carrier that lets customers choose which benefits come with their plan. Instead of fixed bundles of extras plus a discount on a new phone for each line, customers get a single allowance to spend on options ranging from Netflix and ESPN to Xbox Game Pass, Google’s Gemini AI and Delta SkyMiles.

One catch is that phones and perks come out of the same pool of Picks, so a family that wants a new phone on every line may have little left to put toward extras.

The plans, called T-Mix, will be available in November. Existing customers can switch or keep their current plans, said Allan Samson, T-Mobile’s chief marketing officer.

The move comes as T-Mobile’s customer growth slows and new rivals emerge, including SpaceX, a current T-Mobile partner that is reportedly planning a wireless service of its own. T-Mobile’s stock is down about 26% this year, including a drop of nearly 8% on Friday after a report on SpaceX’s wireless plans.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based company has relied for years on “Un-carrier” moves — splashy changes that defy industry conventions — to capture consumer attention.

Samson described T-Mix as the latest of those moves, aimed at what the company’s research identified as a top customer complaint: paying for extras they don’t use. Picks are “essentially a form of currency,” he said. “You can use them for anything you want.”

A subscription hub: With the new plans, T-Mobile is adding a much larger menu of subscriptions in an attempt to turn its plans into a hub for streaming, music, gaming and AI services.

Along with longtime perks such as Netflix, Hulu and Apple TV, the new options include ESPN’s Unlimited streaming service, Xbox Game Pass, YouTube Premium, Apple Music and Google’s Gemini AI subscriptions.

The company says people spend far more on subscriptions than they realize. In T-Mobile’s research, customers estimated spending about $90 a month, Samson said. A separate study by C+R Research puts average spending at $219.

A big part of the idea is to consolidate that spending and let customers move among services more freely, picking up a streaming service for a new show, for example, or adding satellite coverage for a summer trip, then dropping it afterward.

Customers can make those changes every 90 days in the T-Life app. T-Mobile texts them when a 10-day change window opens, and their choices roll over if they do nothing. T-Mobile handles the switch between services in its plans, although the fine print notes that customers may need to initially cancel existing subscriptions on their own to avoid paying twice.

T-Mobile buys subscriptions below retail prices through deals it negotiates with streaming services and other partners. That lets T-Mobile include the services in its plans for less than it would cost customers to subscribe on their own.

Phones vs. perks: For consumers, one trade-off for the newfound flexibility is that phones and perks now draw from the same finite supply.

Customers who hold on to their phones or choose less-expensive models can put that value toward streaming and other extras, but a family that wants a new phone on every line may not have enough Picks to cover them.

Whether consumers end up getting more or less for their money depends largely on how many lines they have and how often they buy new phones. Smaller accounts that keep their phones are likely to come out ahead. Larger families that upgrade every line may pay more and get less, because T-Mobile is also dropping its long-standing free third line.

Samson estimated that accounts with one or two lines will pay $5 to $10 a month less than on T-Mobile’s current plans, while a five-line account might pay $10 to $15 more. Across all of its customers, he said, pricing is roughly the same.

T-Mobile says a family of three on its Loaded plan, which costs $200 a month ($2,400 a year) with AutoPay before taxes and fees, gets more than $4,320 a year in plan features and benefits, based on its own valuation.

The math behind the Picks: Customers choose from three plans, with base prices for customers on AutoPay, before taxes and fees:

• Standard: $55 a month for one line, with one Pick. It’s the basic plan, with limits on high-priority data and video quality.
• More: $75 a month, with two Picks, unlimited high-priority data and 4K video.
• Loaded: $95 a month, with three Picks and the largest allowances for hotspot use and international data.

Adding lines adds Picks, and Picks apply to the whole account, so one Netflix subscription covers the family. Unused Picks don’t accumulate from one quarter to the next.

Most extras cost one or two Picks. Ad-free Netflix costs three, and ESPN Unlimited costs four. Phones cost Picks, too: two for an iPhone and three for an iPhone Pro, Samson said, tied up for the three-year payment plan. A four-line account on the More plan gets seven Picks, not enough for a new iPhone on every line.

No price guarantee: The terms say T-Mobile may change the benefits and the number of Picks each one requires at any time, with changes taking effect the following quarter. Customers who change a partner benefit outside a change window may have to pay a fee. Once a year, customers will also be asked to reselect their benefits.

The launch comes less than a week after New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a settlement with T-Mobile over its 2017 “Price Guarantee” plans, which promised customers the carrier would “never change the price you pay.”

T-Mobile raised prices on those plans by about $5 a line in 2024. It agreed to offer refunds and other options that the attorney general’s office expects to provide more than $38 million in value, and to freeze prices for affected customers until at least 2029.

Asked about price protections, Samson said T-Mix plans don’t come with a guarantee. T-Mobile can control its network costs, he said, but not what partners such as Apple and Xbox charge, although it has multiyear deals in place.

“We didn’t want to be disingenuous,” he said, adding that partner prices are set for the next couple of years but “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in 2030.”

The Un-carrier playbook: T-Mobile launched its Un-carrier campaign in 2013 by dropping two-year contracts. Samson said the company makes an Un-carrier move only when it sees a big customer pain point and believes it has something unique to offer.

T-Mobile has been testing T-Mix since Oct. 1 in 37 stores in Kansas City. Only about 70% of Picks were chosen in the store at the time of purchase, Samson said, in part because families wanted to go home and decide together, and some customers were saving Picks for phones coming out later.

Details of the plans leaked in recent weeks, first reported by The Mobile Report and later by PhoneArena.

Verizon lets customers add discounted streaming bundles to its plans for an extra monthly charge. Samson said the difference with T-Mix is that the benefits are included in the plan price.

Upholding the company’s tradition of jabbing at rivals, he described one competitor’s approach as “naked connectivity.” The other, he said, will “throw you a nice phone and then leave you alone. And every now and then, there’s a rate increase.”

The plans are also one of the first major consumer moves under CEO Srini Gopalan, who succeeded Mike Sievert in the role last November.

T-Mobile’s account growth has slowed this year. In the second quarter, it added a net 277,000 postpaid accounts (households and businesses that pay a monthly bill rather than prepaying for service). That was down 13% from 318,000 a year earlier.

The company reports third-quarter results Wednesday, two days after Verizon.

SpaceX is also reportedly seeking cell sites to build a rival wireless network, even though T-Mobile’s T-Satellite service runs on SpaceX’s Starlink.

Samson, who joined Sprint in 2016 and stayed on after its 2020 merger with T-Mobile, became CMO earlier this year. He previously ran the company’s broadband business and was CMO of T-Mobile for Business. He said T-Mix has been his pet project since taking his current role, starting with interviews with hundreds of consumers.

Samson said it’s too early to say how T-Mix will affect the business. “Ask me in six months once I have about six months under my wings nationwide,” he said, “and then we’ll have some actuals to report.”

Inrix, the Bellevue, Wash.-based traffic data company that spun out of Microsoft in 2004 and became one of the Seattle region’s longest-running independent tech companies, has agreed to sell substantially all of its assets to Arity, the mobility data subsidiary of insurance giant Allstate.

The deal, announced Friday, would end Inrix‘s 22-year run as a standalone company. Inrix has raised more than $288 million and flirted with an IPO multiple times over its lifetime. Terms were not disclosed. The companies expect the acquisition to close later this year.

Founded in 2016, Chicago-based Arity analyzes driving behavior for insurers, marketers and public-sector customers. It says it has amassed more than 3 trillion miles of driving data. The acquisition would pair that information with Inrix’s analytics on traffic, road conditions and transportation networks.

“By combining Arity’s predictive insights on driving behavior and risk with Inrix’s transportation intelligence and mobility analytics, we will be uniquely positioned to deliver more robust intelligence and insights into how people, vehicles, goods, and roads interact,” Gary Hallgren, president of Arity, said in a statement.

While the companies are touting the benefits of combining their data and analytics, Arity’s data practices have faced legal scrutiny. In January 2025, Texas sued Allstate and Arity, alleging they collected and sold consumers’ driving and location data without adequate consent.

“We are confident in our compliance with all laws and regulations and are committed to ensuring consumers are informed when their data is used for personalized insurance rates,” an Arity spokesperson told GeekWire via email.

The proposed acquisition charts an alternate course to Inrix’s earlier plans for going public. In 2012, Inrix hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase with an eye toward a 2013 IPO that was expected to raise up to $100 million. The company looked to go public again in 2022 but backed out amid economic uncertainty stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other factors.

“We were about two weeks away from filing our documents with the SEC,” Inrix CEO Bryan Mistele said in an August 2022 GeekWire story. “We’re on standby right now, waiting to see when the markets and economy improve, in which case we’ll take another run at it.”

Inrix declined via email to comment on the reason why it chose to sell at this time.

“By leveraging the complementary strengths of both organizations, we see an opportunity to turn transportation data into actionable intelligence that helps organizations make better decisions and create safer, more efficient, and more connected transportation systems,” an Inrix spokesperson said.

Inrix serves corporate, automotive, technology and public-sector customers including Amazon, IBM, General Motors, Windermere Real Estate and state departments of transportation.

The company got its start selling traffic and transportation-related data. In recent years, it moved beyond supplying raw traffic data into subscription software that helps customers interpret it, including tools for traffic-signal timing, road safety and retail site selection.

Recent public releases include its first Parking Scorecard, which ranks the availability and cost of parking in major cities in the U.S. and Europe.

Inrix has about 277 employees, based on LinkedIn data. A spokesperson said that “all eligible” employees will receive job offers from Arity, and there are no planned changes to the company’s Bellevue headquarters.

Editor’s note: Comments from Arity and Inrix spokespeople were added 10/19.

Seattle-based TriMagnetix has landed new funding and commitments totaling $1 million to continue developing a semiconductor chip that, according to initial lab testing, consumes 800 times less energy than a traditional chip to process the same amount of data.

The startup uses nanomagnetic technology that requires only electrical pulses rather than the constant power stream traditional chips need, dramatically reducing electricity consumption and heat generation. The design also makes the chip resistant to radiation, and it’s built to integrate with existing computing infrastructure.

The startup has made additional progress beyond the new funding:

• TriMagnetix is partnering with WaveWorks Technologies on its first paid pilot.
• It has joined the Plug and Play Semiconductor Accelerator.
• It was recently accepted into the Nvidia Inception program, which offers support including access to tech experts, introductions to Nvidia’s corporate clients and marketing.

Earthbound data centers struggling to curb energy use and heat output are seeking more sustainable chips, but the startup is particularly interested in satellite applications.

The Pacific Northwest, home to companies including Starcloud and SpaceX, is the “satellite capital of the world,” said Lucas Hahn, co-founder, president and chief strategic officer of TriMagnetix.

Satellite companies have told him they want semiconductors that are energy efficient and resistant to the radiation experienced in space, Hahn said. That makes TriMagnetix’s devices “a no-brainer.”

In addition to Hahn, the startup’s other employee is Madison Hanberry, who launched the TriMagnetix in 2023. Hanberry, who has served as chief of research and development, is transitioning to CEO. His sister, Aspen White, is also a co-founder.

The chips made so far by TriMagnetix are not the high-performance graphics processing units, or GPUs, used for applications such as AI and 3D animation. Nor are they simpler central processing units, or CPUs.

“It’s replacing specific compute in certain devices at a very low level,” Hahn said. “So not quite CPU yet, but it is at the core level doing similar things.”

TriMagnetix has contracted with the Washington Nanofabrication Facility at the University of Washington to use the site’s fabrication equipment. It aims to have a product available for commercial sales within the next year.

The round was led by Acequia Capital with participation from Athenaeum Ventures. Actuate Ventures has also committed to the round. The combined total from the three firms is $1 million. Last year, the startup received a $200,000 investment from climate venture fund SNØCAP.

— Brinc Drones, the Seattle-based maker of 911 response drones, has named Joe Levy chief revenue officer. Levy joins from Peregrine, a public safety data platform, and early in his career was a drill sergeant and combat engineer for the U.S. Army Reserve.

Levy praised the Brinc team, saying, “They’re passionate about what they do with a vision that will change the public safety landscape. I’m grateful to join them and help scale what they’ve built.”

Brinc announced a $125 million funding round in July, bringing its total raised to more than $280 million. The startup is hiring for numerous roles and is No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Jessie Minton vice president and chief digital and information officer, a new position that brings the roles together.

Former Chief Data Officer Jeff Leek stepped down and is now a professor in the Fred Hutch Public Health Sciences Division and CEO of Synthesize Bio, a startup he co-founded in 2023. Last month, Fred Hutch announced Shawn Stapleton as VP and chief AI and innovation officer, another new role.

Minton joins from Washington University in St. Louis where she has been vice chancellor for technology and chief information officer since 2022. She was previously VP and CIO at the University of Oregon.

Fred Hutch praised Minton’s track record “of modernizing complex technology organizations, strengthening cybersecurity, governing large-scale Epic environments and aligning technology strategy with clinical, research and academic priorities.” The new role is effective Dec. 7.

— Jason (JJ) James has been named chief information officer of Acumatica, the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant that was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners. James has more than 25 years in technology leadership and was previously CIO at companies including Aptos Retail, Net Health and Optima Healthcare Solutions.

“My focus is putting AI to work across Acumatica while keeping security at the core, so we can move fast without compromising the trust our expanding community of customers, partners and developers places in us,” James said in a statement.

— Seattle tech leader Andrew Bennett has joined San Francisco-based Motive as chief marketing officer. Bennett was with Smartsheet for a decade, leaving as CMO in 2024. He is also a limited partner with the investment firm Stage 2 Capital.

Motive provides software, hardware and AI-powered tools to help businesses manage physical fleets of vehicles and heavy equipment.

— Steven Chen has left LinkedIn, where he served as director and head of corporate legal and sustainability, to become a senior director at Rubrik.

— Seattle-based LevelTen Energy, a startup facilitating the deployment of clean energy projects, has appointed John Barrow as director of a new initiative enabling the purchase and sale of data center projects under development.

Barrow joins from CyrusOne, a global data center developer and operator, and was with CPS Energy for more than 15 years.

“In my career, I’ve had a front-row seat to the data center boom,” Barrow said. Participants are struggling to quickly secure locations and energy, he said, adding that LevelTen “can solve those problems for industry participants at scale.”

— Certivo, a Seattle startup building technology to automate supply chain compliance, has named Jeffrey Bornstein to its board. Bornstein was with GE for nearly three decades and served in roles including vice chairman and chief financial officer.

“He has run the numbers for some of the most complex industrial supply chains in the world while regulators checked every one of them,” said Certivo CEO Kunal Chopra. Certivo is No. 194 on the GeekWire 200.

— Convera, a Seattle-based fintech company helping businesses transfer money across borders, has added to its leadership team. All four will work out of Convera’s other offices.

• Mike Cahill has been appointed EVP and chief operating officer after joining in June as interim chief product and technology officer. Past employers include Early Warning Services, the company behind Zelle, as well as PayPal, Boku and American Express.
• Jon Southall has been named SVP and chief technology officer. He joins from PayPal and has also worked for Boku and Braintree.
• Tui Allen has joined as SVP and chief product officer. She previously worked for employers including Ticketmaster, Shopify and Blackbaud.
• Chris Steinig has been named CIO after leading Convera’s technology operations for four years.

— Portable Consultants a Redmond, Wash., enterprise telecommunications and data connectivity provider, has named two leaders.

• Carrie Ferrero has joined as VP of product and marketing development. She previously served as VP of sales engineering at Connectbase.
• Troy Brockway has been named director of client development, joining from SpikeUp Media.

— Reperio Health, a Portland, Ore., startup bringing preventive health check-ups into the home, has named Brad Nations to its board of directors. Nations is CEO and founder of JB Advisory.

— iQmetrix, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company building point-of-sale and retail management software for cell phone and wireless stores, has appointed Beniamin Longodor as VP of global growth. Longodor, who is based in Austria, was previously with NTS Retail.

Xbox is creating a new team to experiment with technologies that are changing how games are made, ported and played — including some that run counter to how the game industry and its business have traditionally worked.

Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Xbox Labs on Tuesday in a memo to employees, describing it as “a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience.”

The group will be led by Scott Van Vliet, Xbox’s chief technology officer since May. Sharma said the team will build in the open and measure success “by whether more people are playing and creating.”

Sharma pointed to recent examples of games being decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never designed for, as well as Windows PC games translated to run on Apple Silicon or inside a web browser. She called these “unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.”

The memo never uses the term AI (or SI), but it frames the effort in part around AI agents.

“Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software,” Sharma wrote. “Games share many of those same properties.” She said people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing Xbox games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.

Sharma came to Xbox in February from Microsoft’s CoreAI division. In her first memo as CEO, she said games would be “crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us,” and pledged not to “flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.”

In May, she pulled Gaming Copilot from mobile and canceled its console launch, saying Xbox would “retire features that don’t align with where we’re headed.”

Microsoft last month cut 268 roles in Xbox Game Studios and moved work on the next Halo game to Activision. It was the latest round in a reset Sharma announced in July, which called for about 3,200 job cuts by the end of this fiscal year, roughly 20% of the Xbox workforce. The company said at the time that the restructuring was about 75% complete.

Xbox’s priorities aren’t changing, Sharma wrote in her new memo, describing Labs as “a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway.”

Seattle defense startup Overland AI has unveiled IBEX, a new fully autonomous ground vehicle selected by the U.S. Marine Corps to support counter-drone air defense operations and execute high-risk frontline missions, including resupply, breaching, and electronic warfare.

IBEX was developed under a Department of War APFIT production contract that recently expanded to $25 million with added funding for the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment. The initial $20 million milestone deal made Overland AI the first ground autonomy startup to serve as a primary defense hardware supplier, with the Marine Corps selecting the platform for integration into its Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS).

Built on the chassis, engine, and drivetrain of the Polaris MRZR — an ultra-light utility vehicle already used, fueled, and maintained across the armed forces — IBEX can carry a 2,000-pound payload and reach fully autonomous speeds exceeding 35 mph. The vehicle offers a 250-mile cruising range at 20 mph and is sized to fit inside a V-22 Osprey for air transport.

IBEX is powered by Overland AI’s proprietary OverDrive software stack, which combines real-time terrain perception with adaptive route planning to navigate complex, off-road environments at speed without relying on GPS signals or pre-mapped routes. Drivers can control multiple uncrewed vehicles simultaneously using OverWatch, the startup’s command-and-control software.

IBEX provides 5 kW of export power to run onboard sensors and defense systems, addressing energy limits in forward field operations. The company describes each vehicle as a combined power, communications, and compute node designed to operate independently in environments with limited or disrupted communications.

“We pride ourselves on developing technology that is informed directly by the warfighter,” Greg Okopal, co-founder and chief operating officer of Overland AI, said in a statement, adding that IBEX can be deployed on day one and maintained with the parts and fuel units already have.

The vehicle joins the startup’s existing flagship platform, ULTRA, as the company continues scaling production at its Seattle manufacturing facility to meet growing military demand for autonomous ground systems.

Founded in 2022 as a spinout from the University of Washington, Overland AI has rapidly expanded its defense operations, raising $100 million in Series B funding earlier this year.

The startup — No. 7 on the GeekWire 200 ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups — has raised over $140 million in venture funding to date.

In 2025, Overland opened a 22,000-square-foot production facility in the Rainier Beach neighborhood south of downtown Seattle. And this summer, the startup established an engineering outpost in Burlingame, Calif., aiming to tap into the Bay Area’s robotics and autonomy talent pool.

Overland AI’s growth reflects a broader defense technology boom across the Seattle region, where established firms and fast-growing startups are building major hardware and software footprints.

Companies expanding in the region include Shield AI, which selected the Seattle area for a massive manufacturing facility to build its autonomous X-BAT fighter jet; Anduril, which sees a path to 1,000 Seattle-area engineers across its Bellevue and Seattle hubs; and Echodyne, which opened a $40 million radar manufacturing factory in Woodinville to support drone detection demand.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is bringing together leaders from Amazon, Spotify, the Port of Seattle, organized labor, technology, cleantech, small business and other sectors as part of a new task force focused on rebuilding and diversifying the city’s economy.

Wilson on Wednesday announced 18 members of the Resilient Seattle Economy Task Force, which will look for ways to remove barriers to business growth, attract and retain companies and improve the process of starting and operating a business in Seattle.

“I’m charging this task force with identifying where the City can make connections, remove barriers and provide support within individual industries and across our economy,” Wilson said. “We need to diversify our economy while expanding opportunities for local entrepreneurs and young people.”

The effort builds on the city’s recently released Seawall: Building a Resilient Seattle Economy report, which called for Seattle to diversify beyond its heavy reliance on large technology companies and focus on sectors including artificial intelligence, cleantech, maritime, life sciences and space.

That report found that companies with at least 100 employees accounted for 74.5% of net job growth in the Seattle metro area from 2014 to 2023, while mid-sized companies accounted for just 16.6%.

The economic challenges have also put a spotlight on Seattle’s tax structure. As GeekWire recently reported, Seattle lost roughly 24,000 jobs between March 2020 and March 2025 even as city tax collections continued to grow, shifting more of the tax burden onto businesses.

Wilson has responded in part by freezing JumpStart tax rates in her proposed 2027 budget, citing “seismic shifts” in the technology sector.

The new task force will initially focus on downtown revitalization, business attraction and retention, cross-sector collaboration, and making it easier to open and operate a business. The task force also comes as Seattle’s business community has pressed City Hall for action on public safety, with dozens of regional CEOs recently calling for a 100-day plan with measurable goals and progress reports.

“Seattle is open for business,” said Beto Yarce, director of the Seattle Office of Economic Development.

The task force will hold industry-specific roundtables and listening sessions this year, with initial findings due in February 2027 and a final report expected in November 2027. Here’s a look at the task force members:

• Alvertis Brooks, Executive Director, Rainier Valley Community Development Fund 

• Anson Fatland, Associate Vice Provost for Innovation Strategy & Ventures, University of Washington Co-Motion 

• Bill Frame, Chairman & CEO, Kidder Mathews 

• Cate Bridenstine, CEO, The Imagine Institute 

• Dae Shik Kim, Executive Development Producer, Spotify & Get Me Outta Here 

• Donna Moodie, Chief Impact Officer, Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle and Founder & CEO, Marjorie Restaurants 

• Jared Axelrod, Sr. Manager, Public Policy, Amazon 

• Joe Nguyen, President & CEO, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce 

• Katie Garrow, Executive Secretary-Treasurer, MLK Labor 

• Laura Clise, Founder & CEO, Intentionalist 

• Marcus Lalario, Founder & CEO, Sugarshack Unlimited 

• Mel Clark, President & CEO, Cleantech Alliance 

• Rian Watt, Executive Director, Economic Opportunity Institute 

• Ryan Calkins, President, Port of Seattle 

• Shannon Braddock, President & CEO, Greater Seattle Partners 

• Tammy Canavan, President & CEO, Visit Seattle 

• Terrance Stevenson, Director of Industry and Community Relations, Washington Technology Industry Association 

• Yifan Zhang, Managing Director, AI House 

Editor’s note: GeekWire publishes guest opinions to highlight a range of perspectives on issues shaping the tech and startup community. To submit a guest column, email tips@geekwire.com.

This fall, Washington state voters will once again have to defend their economic future and core competitive edge by voting yes on Initiative 645 to repeal the state income tax.

Earlier this year, state lawmakers established the new state income tax. Supporters claim that this tax will only impact higher-income earners. But the measure includes broad new income taxing powers that make every Washingtonian and those doing business in the state a target.

How do we know this? Legislators have made it clear by their actions — and actions speak louder than words!

Most notably, the income tax was written specifically to cover pensions, reversing Washington’s previous commitment to not tax pension retirement income. While teacher, firefighter and other pensioners are not initially paying the state income tax, the only reason to make their income subject to the tax is to require them to pay when it is lowered to apply to them.

Second, Olympia actually voted twice on the income tax — once to pass the income tax, and a second time to ensure they could expand it to everyone. They wanted to make clear their intent to voters.

Finally, the income tax is already driving people out of the state, which will result in lower tax revenues. We can be confident that Sen. Jamie Pedersen (who has stated publicly that he supports a universal income tax on all Washingtonians) and the Legislature will use that shortfall as justification to apply the tax to many more Washingtonians. So, unless you vote yes on I-645, you can expect to pay the income tax soon.

Even the state’s most prominent Democrats are calling out Olympia’s runaway spending. Former Gov. Christine Gregoire told Washington business leaders recently that Olympia has “a spending problem, not a revenue problem,” noting the state budget has grown from $33 billion to $80 billion since she left office. Former Gov. Gary Locke, similarly, called Olympia’s spending “out of control.”

Two Democratic governors, sounding the same alarm, should tell legislators to focus on spending cuts, not tax increases. But, instead of looking for savings, Washington’s political leaders passed the largest tax and spending increase ($9.3 billion) in state history in 2025, and then followed it up with another $2.3 billion spending increase in 2026.

The pattern is as clear in Washington as it is in other states that are falling behind competitively: no matter how much citizens hand over in taxes, legislators always think it’s never enough. Giving lawmakers even more of our tax dollars when they have failed to responsibly manage what they have hurts everyone in the state.

Beyond the impact to personal paychecks, there are two long-term consequences that will negatively impact voters — whether they pay the tax or not.

First, job creators and job opportunities are leaving the state. National IRS migration data already shows high earners leaving high-tax states at an accelerating rate. Washington ranks sixth highest in the nation for losing higher-income residents, and a state income tax will accelerate this trend. A 2026 Association of Washington Business survey found nearly 1 in 4 Washington employers are now considering relocating out of state, nearly triple the rate from just a year earlier.

Companies such as Starbucks, moving a large share of its corporate workforce to Nashville, are shifting operations and jobs out of the state in response to the increasingly hostile tax climate and the costs of doing business. Sadly, the result is that Washington has an unemployment rate hovering near 5%, tied for sixth highest in the country and nearly a full percentage point above the national average.

Second, avoiding the tax effectively means cutting all ties to Washington. Under the new law, it appears taxpayers can only shed their Washington domicile by spending 30 days or fewer in the state a year and selling their home. It’s no surprise active home listings are up an average 27% in much of Washington this year.

This rule is also an existential threat for the state’s largest nonprofits, as financial advisors are already telling clients the “gold standard” for anyone trying to sever ties is to stop philanthropic giving in Washington entirely.

The last time Washingtonians voted on an income tax was in 2010. That income tax proposal, I-1098, was rejected by a 64%-36% voting margin. Companies including Microsoft, Boeing and Expedia, as well as the founders of Amazon and T-Mobile, supported the effort to stop the income tax. They were right to do so for the benefit of their employees and the citizens of Washington.

In the years since, economic growth and investment enabled the state spending budget to dramatically increase from under $30 billion to more than $80 billion without an income tax. Washington cannot afford to follow the path of states like New York and Oregon, where out-of-control spending leads to higher taxes and an increasingly difficult climate for families and businesses. We need a state that can compete!

This November, voters have the opportunity to send a message to politicians by doing what they have done time and again: vote yes on I-645 to repeal the state income tax and help Washington succeed for generations to come.

Seattle’s tax collections have nearly tripled over the past decade, soaring from $900 million in 2013 to a projected $2.8 billion in 2026. But who pays those taxes, and how the tax revenue is collected, looks vastly different today than a decade ago.

A new report released by ECOnorthwest, commissioned jointly by the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, show city tax revenues far outstripping population and job growth, driven by targeted corporate taxes on a small pool of major employers.

Between 2013 and 2025, Seattle’s tax revenues jumped 172%, outpacing population growth (31%), job growth (23%), and local inflation (50%). During that period, real tax growth grew 5.6 times faster than population and 7.5 times faster than employment.

The findings come as city leaders, major tech employers and regional business groups grapple with shifting post-pandemic work patterns and a political climate that has frequently placed large technology companies like Amazon in its sights.

According to the report, broad-based core taxes, such as property, sales, utility, and general Business & Occupation (B&O) taxes, comprised 83% of city tax collections in 2013. By 2026, those core broad taxes are projected to drop to just 52% of the total revenue.

Replacing them are narrow, targeted tax levies:

• The JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax (2021): Paid by fewer than 500 companies, with the top 10 taxpayers footing 73% of the total bill.
• The Social Housing Tax (2025): Paid by roughly 220 entities, with its top 10 taxpayers covering 66%.

Combined, two taxes that did not exist five years ago now account for nearly a third of all business tax dollars collected by the city. Overlap among top taxpayers means fewer than 20 companies account for roughly $356 million in annual City of Seattle revenue.

“Seattle’s tax collections are growing far faster than its population, jobs or inflation. Employers are carrying more of that burden. That trajectory is not sustainable,” said Seattle Metro Chamber president & CEO Joe Nguyen. “The question cannot always be how to collect more money. It must be how to deliver better results with the money we already have and build a tax structure that helps our economy grow.”

The heavy pivot to business revenue coincides with divergent employment trends between Seattle and its neighboring Eastside hubs.

Between March 2020 and March 2025, Seattle lost approximately 24,000 jobs, while the remainder of King County added 21,000. The report notes that Seattle lost 18,000 jobs in the single year leading up to March 2025 alone. And that figure that does not yet capture the full impact of major remote work policies and tech layoffs announced across the region.

The report arrives on the heels of previous GeekWire coverage tracking regional tech dynamics, including the shift of high tech jobs from Seattle to Bellevue, as well as broader political shifts in how West Coast hubs are responding to tech sector backlash and the AI boom.

However, in a sign that Mayor Katie Wilson is paying close attention to tech-sector headwinds and shifting job patterns, she proposed a $9.1 billion 2027 budget that would erase a $175 million general fund deficit and cut nearly $50 million in spending while freezing JumpStart tax rates.

Seattle voice AI startup Ultravox, which launched as Fixie, has been acquired by Inworld for an undisclosed sum.

Ultravox was founded in 2022 by Google and Apple veterans to build a speech model for real-time, natural-sounding AI voice agents.

In perhaps its most whimsical project, the startup launched the HiSanta.ai website in December 2023, allowing users to chat with Santa Claus, who spoke with a British accent, as well as Rudolph, Mrs. Claus and other North Pole notables. The site is no longer active.

The company announced a $17 million seed round in March 2023, and PitchBook put its valuation at $51.46 million at the time. Redpoint Ventures led the round, which included Madrona Venture Group, Zetta Venture Partners, SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta and Kearny Jackson. Current and former executives at Google, Amazon and Apple also invested.

Ultravox has 10 employees, according to LinkedIn. It was unclear whether the entire team would join Inworld, which is based in Mountain View, Calif.

“We’re excited to welcome members of the Ultravox team and continue building the platform,” said Inworld CEO Kylan Gibbs in a statement.

The acquisition will allow Inworld to adopt Ultravox’s technology for managing turn-taking and interruptions in voice conversations with AI, which should improve performance in real-time chats.

Inworld has raised $119.8 million since launching in 2021 and is valued at $515 million, according to PitchBook.

Ultravox co-founder Zach Koch was most recently the company’s CEO. His LinkedIn profile says he is now vice president of product at Shopify. Peter Salas, who joined the company as a software engineer in 2023, is currently listed as chief technology officer.

The startup’s original CEO, Matt Welsh, departed two years ago and is now head of AI systems at defense company Palantir Technologies. Co-founders Hessam Bagherinezhad and Justin Uberti also left, in 2023 and 2024 respectively, and both joined OpenAI.

The release announcing the acquisition said Ultravox customers would be upgraded to Inworld’s Realtime TTS-2 voice technology.

Starfish Space’s first full-scale Otter satellite servicing vehicle went into orbit today, marking a major milestone for the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup.

The Otter spacecraft was among 130 payloads launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Otter is roughly the size of a kitchen oven, with solar arrays that were folded up for launch.

Other payloads on the satellite rideshare mission, known as Transporter-18, included Cowboy Space’s first power-beaming satellite, a prototype for Google’s AI data-center constellation, and a NASA-funded probe that will track the energy released by galaxies and supernovas.

Today’s liftoff through surface-level fog — and the return of the Falcon 9’s first-stage booster to a nearby landing pad — proceeded like clockwork. A little more than an hour after launch, Otter separated from the rocket’s upper stage and powered up for orbital operations.

Once Otter is fully commissioned, it will rendezvous with and inspect a series of inoperable satellites for a $15 million NASA mission known as Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability, or SSPICY for short. The capabilities demonstrated by SSPICY could be used during future missions to check the health of active satellites, or dispose of defunct satellites.

SSPICY may not be the only mission that Otter takes on during its operating lifetime.

“Success in the mission is to actually go and provide this commercial inspection service on a number of these different spacecraft, and that will be a huge win in and of itself,” Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett told GeekWire last week. “But we’re also bringing Otter along to provide servicing well beyond that, so we could go and inspect more spacecraft, or potentially do some additional docking past the initial mission.”

This inaugural Otter mission follows up on two orbital flight tests involving smaller-scale Otter Pup prototypes. The first test fell short of linking up with its target satellite but was able to demonstrate Starfish’s satellite-tracking system. The second Otter Pup went into orbit last year and is currently closing in on its target.

Starfish Space is already preparing for future Otter missions — including a satellite disposal job for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, two commercial satellite servicing missions in geostationary Earth orbit, and two servicing missions for the U.S. Space Force.

More about Transporter-18’s payloads:

• Cowboy Space’s Reason-1 satellite is designed to collect solar energy in space and transmit it to a ground receiver with a kilowatt-class laser, advancing technologies central to the company’s planned orbital data centers. Cowboy Space, formerly known as Aetherflux, is headquartered in California but is setting up a 291,035-square-foot manufacturing facility in Kent, Wash.
• Google’s Project Suncatcher M1 prototype, built by Planet Labs, will test the tensor processing units that Google plans to use for its orbital AI data-center constellation. The prototype is “designed to gather in-orbit data on how our TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space,” Google said in a blog post.
• Star Catcher’s Protostar satellite will be involved in an experiment to beam power from the main spacecraft to a smaller deployable satellite equipped with off-the-shelf solar panels. The Protostar mission is meant to blaze a trail for the orbital power grid that Star Catcher hopes to create.
• The SPRITE CubeSat is part of a $4 million mission funded by NASA and led by the University of Colorado that will study how stars and galaxies shaped the evolution of the early universe. The satellite is equipped with a far-ultraviolet imaging spectrograph. SPRITE stands for Supernova Remnants and Proxies for Reionization Testbed Experiment.

Seattle’s economic engine is stalling, and downtown is taking the brunt of the hit.

Between 2024 and 2025, Seattle shed 18,065 total jobs, with a staggering 70% of those losses—13,000 jobs—coming directly from the city’s downtown core, according to a new report released by the Downtown Seattle Association.

In some ways, it’s a tale of two cities.

While Seattle proper shrank, neighboring Eastside tech hub Bellevue gained 5,375 jobs over the same timeframe, highlighting a shifting center of gravity within the Puget Sound region.

A lot of that growth in Bellevue, and decline in Seattle is coming from one company: Amazon.

The online retail and cloud computing powerhouse employed 15,700 workers in Bellevue at the end of 2025, making it the largest employer in Bellevue at 9.85% of the total workforce, according to the city’s Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. That’s up from just a few hundred employees in Bellevue nearly a decade ago.

Amazon employs about 49,000 people in Seattle proper, though the Puget Sound Business Journal noted this week that the company has shed office space in downtown Seattle and dramatically slowed employment in the city.

Other key findings from the Downtown Seattle Association report:

• Tech Leads the Drop: Seattle’s sharpest sector declines were concentrated in Information and Technology, Professional Services, and Construction.
• National Lag: Out of the top 30 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, the Puget Sound region ranked 20th in job growth between 2019 and 2025. Total regional nonfarm growth rose just 1.7% over six years, vastly underperforming peer markets like Austin (25.2%), Dallas/Fort Worth (14%), and Nashville (14%).
• Stagnant Commuter Foot Traffic: Inbound commuter visits to downtown Seattle remain stuck in the low 60% range compared to 2019 baselines, sliding 38% since the pandemic — a steeper loss than Bellevue (-21%), Austin (-23%), or Chicago (-32%).
• Intra-Region Tech Shift: While Seattle’s tech headcount dropped from its 2023 peak, Bellevue’s tech job totals surged upward between 2024 and 2025, regaining momentum.

The latest findings build on a growing chorus of criticism regarding the city’s fiscal climate. A June analysis by the DSA argued that Seattle’s controversial “JumpStart” payroll expense tax—passed in 2020 and targeting major employers like Amazon—is backfiring by driving business across Lake Washington.

The June report highlighted that since 2020, downtown Seattle lost roughly 30,000 jobs and saw office building values plummet 48%, while Bellevue—which levies no comparable head tax—gained jobs and expanded commercial values by 7%.

Though JumpStart projects $388 million in revenue this year, about 70% of that relies on just 10 major companies, underscoring how heavily Seattle leans on a handful of tech giants.

City of Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson has consistently pushed back against blaming downtown’s struggles on any single tax, pointing to broader post-pandemic remote-work trends, high interest rates and national tech restructurings that affect cities nationwide. She credited JumpStart with saving the city from drastic service cuts during the pandemic and noted that Seattle’s recovery remains resilient.

However, in a sign that Mayor Wilson is paying close attention to tech-sector headwinds and shifting job patterns in the region, she last week proposed a $9.1 billion 2027 budget, which would erase a $175 million general fund deficit and cut nearly $50 million in spending while freezing JumpStart tax rates.

Citing “seismic shifts” in the technology sector, the mayor’s freeze leaves the payroll tax untouched to offer big employers a period of tax stability, even as she continues directing JumpStart revenues beyond their original intent to cover core general fund operations.

“These were a set of taxes that may have provided some short-term gain to the city coffers, but are inflicting long-term pain,” DSA President and CEO Jon Scholes told GeekWire in an interview in June. “We predicted that at the time, and were sort of dismissed and ignored.” 

Microsoft cut 277 jobs in the Seattle region as part of its latest round of layoffs, with artists, game designers and producers making up a large share of the affected roles, a new filing shows.

The filing was made public Thursday afternoon under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. Microsoft gave approximate numbers earlier this week when it announced the cuts, which included the latest stage in the company’s ongoing Xbox restructuring.

Art, game production, game design, technical art and audio design account for 77 of the 277 positions listed in the filing. Software engineering is the largest single category, totaling 60 roles.

Other positions are in functional areas including product marketing, technical writing, product management, data science, business management, finance and legal.

The filing says 252 of the positions impacted in the state are based at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, with 25 held by remote employees in the region, adding up to the 277 total. Microsoft had previously said about 300 of the cuts were in Washington state, out of fewer than 600 globally.

Out of that global total, 268 were in Xbox Game Studios, part of a restructuring designed to return the games division to growth and profitability. Halo Studios in Redmond faced a substantial reduction, and the company said work on the next Halo game is moving to its Activision subsidiary.

Microsoft cut 605 Washington jobs in July as part of 4,800 layoffs worldwide at the time. The company eliminated more than 15,000 positions globally across two rounds in 2025.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson on Tuesday proposed a budget that closes the city’s inherited deficit largely through spending cuts and rules out new taxes on big business. That includes any increase to the JumpStart payroll tax she helped create, a decision that comes amid a rocky stretch for the region’s tech industry.

The $9.1 billion proposed 2027 budget, the first year of the city’s 2027–28 biennial plan, aims to erase a $175 million General Fund deficit without new progressive revenue.

Wilson’s plan cuts nearly $50 million a year in General Fund spending and eliminates 128 full-time positions, 15 of which are currently filled. It also continues using JumpStart revenue to prop up general city services, while keeping more than 30% of the tax’s annual revenue — about $140 million — dedicated to affordable housing.

Speaking at the Seattle Central Library on Tuesday, Wilson framed the decision as a response to economic conditions.

“We are watching seismic shifts in the tech sector, which anchors so much of our regional economy,” Wilson said. Raising additional progressive revenue presents high risks while downtown remains fragile, she added, noting that expanding taxes like JumpStart is “not the right move” right now.

The stance marks a notable turn for Wilson. Before taking office, she helped design and push for JumpStart as a community activist. As recently as July, she called raising the tax an option for closing the budget gap. On Tuesday, she acknowledged she is “continuing to direct JumpStart dollars beyond the programs it was originally intended for,” and said she aims to grow the tax’s housing share in future budgets.

Passed by the City Council in July 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, JumpStart was pitched as a way to fund affordable housing, climate initiatives, small business support, and equitable development. It applies to businesses with large Seattle payrolls and taxes the pay of employees earning roughly $194,000 or more, at rates ranging up to 2.55% depending on payroll size and salary levels.

Because of high salaries and equity-heavy compensation across major tech firms, the tax falls heavily on big tech. Just 10 top taxpayers, led by companies like Amazon, Meta, and Google, account for roughly 70% of JumpStart revenue.

JumpStart was designed with guardrails to protect spending on housing and community development, but it quickly became a lifeline for City Hall during post-pandemic revenue shortfalls. Under Wilson’s predecessors, the city routinely shifted roughly $200 million or more a year from the tax into the General Fund to patch structural deficits.

By holding rates steady, Wilson’s budget offers Seattle tech employers a period of tax stability amid growing friction over the city’s business climate. Business groups have long argued that heavy payroll taxes undermine Seattle’s competitiveness, pushing job growth and tech investment toward Eastside hubs like Bellevue and Redmond that don’t impose comparable payroll taxes.

That debate was reignited in June by a Downtown Seattle Association report examining the tax five years after its passage. The report tied JumpStart to the loss of about 30,000 downtown jobs and found that downtown Seattle office properties lost 48% of their assessed value between 2020 and 2025, while downtown Bellevue’s rose 7%.

While Wilson cautioned at the time against blaming downtown’s complex post-pandemic recovery on a single policy, her decision to hold JumpStart rates steady reflects her administration’s apparent willingness to listen to business concerns as City Hall works to revitalize the commercial core.

On Tuesday, DSA President and CEO Jon Scholes welcomed her budget, saying that not adding business taxes while employers face headwinds is “important and a helpful signal to the business community.”

Last week, during the launch of Partnership for a Competitive Puget Sound, a new regional initiative brought together by Challenge Seattle to strengthen the area’s tech strategy, Microsoft President Brad Smith referred to the tax.

As structured, the payroll tax “is really a tax on tech jobs,” Smith said, “and that’s why you’re seeing more tech jobs move from Seattle to places like Bellevue and the Eastside.” He noted that San Francisco abolished its payroll tax the same year Seattle adopted one, in 2021.

“You should tax things you want to discourage, like cigarettes, not jobs,” Smith said at the time.

On Tuesday, Amazon offered its reaction to the mayor’s budget plan.

“We appreciate Mayor Wilson putting forward a budget that focuses on making use of existing resources,” an Amazon spokesperson told GeekWire. “Like Mayor Wilson, we believe the city’s first priority should be making sure those resources are used effectively and deliver results for residents.”

Beyond payroll taxes, Wilson’s budget speech and recent executive actions touched on several tech-adjacent priorities:

Housing permitting acceleration: Following an executive order last month launching a Housing Production Task Force, the budget funds a new Affordable Housing Ombud position to help community developers navigate city permitting faster.

Algorithmic pricing transparency: The budget funds implementation of the city’s Fair and Transparent Pricing policy. The City Council was scheduled to take a final vote Tuesday on the ordinance, making Seattle the first city in the country to ban algorithmic price discrimination (also known as surveillance pricing) for groceries.

Economic diversification and AI exposure: The budget proposal follows an executive order Wilson signed earlier this month aimed at diversifying Seattle’s economy. A city-commissioned report warned that local employment is 42% more exposed to AI disruption than the national average, prompting the order’s call for targeted support to retain growing startups.

Green technology investments: The budget maintains JumpStart-funded Green New Deal programs, including building decarbonization, urban forest support, and clean energy apprenticeships.

With the proposed budget now formally submitted, the Seattle City Council begins a nine-week review process chaired by Councilmember Dan Strauss. Public hearings are scheduled for Oct. 6 and Nov. 5, and councilmembers have until Oct. 20 to submit proposed amendments before Strauss presents a revised balancing package in early November.

A final council vote to adopt the final budget is slated for Nov. 20.

Microsoft is making hundreds of additional layoffs on Tuesday morning, continuing the Xbox restructuring announced in July but also extending beyond it with job cuts in areas including cloud, AI, marketing and research.

The company said the total reductions number fewer than 600 globally. About 300 of them are in Washington state, according to the company. It continues the steady trickle of job cuts by Microsoft and other tech companies in the Seattle region in recent months.

[Update: A filing made public Thursday put the official total in the state at 277 jobs.]

Worldwide, the company is cutting 268 roles in Xbox Game Studios, including Halo Studios, other first-party studios and the division’s management and operating teams.

It’s the continuation of a larger effort by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to cut costs and consolidate game studios under fewer publishers in an effort to return to growth and profitability.

Microsoft said in July that Xbox would shed about 3,200 roles by the end of its fiscal year, roughly 20% of the division, in what Sharma called the biggest restructuring in Xbox history. The latest Xbox cuts are part of those previously announced numbers.

The company said Tuesday that the Xbox restructuring is now about 75% complete.

“The goal is to strengthen our franchises and games by operating fewer business units, aligning groups that already work closely together, and focusing our publishing expertise,” Matt Booty, Xbox chief content officer, wrote in a memo to employees Tuesday morning.

New Xbox restructuring details

Work on the next Halo game is moving to Activision, which Microsoft acquired in 2023 for $68.7 billion. The game will be led by a new team separate from the Call of Duty franchise.

A reduced team will stay at Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) in Redmond to support existing Halo games, the community and esports.

Rob Kostich, president of Activision, said in a statement that the company has “already begun assembling a purpose-built team, unique in capability and talent.” He said the goal is to “make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place.”

Activision is also taking over World’s Edge, the Redmond studio behind Age of Empires, and assuming control of Rare, the English studio behind Sea of Thieves.

Ninja Theory is facing a possible shutdown. Microsoft said in July it had a deal to hand off the studio, which makes the Hellblade series. That agreement fell through, as did a second one. Microsoft is telling employees that the studio could close, but it still hopes to hand it off.

Obsidian Entertainment will become part of Bethesda. The California studio made Fallout: New Vegas for Bethesda in 2010 as an outside developer, and it’s working on another game set in the Fallout universe now. Obsidian’s Grounded survival franchise will move over as well.

Microsoft Casual Games is moving under King, the maker of Candy Crush. The Redmond team makes Microsoft Solitaire and other titles bundled with Windows.

Turn 10 Studios and Playground Games will merge into a single studio, making both the Forza racing games and the Fable series. Turn 10 is in Redmond and Playground is in England. The two have worked together on Forza for a decade.

Undead Labs has been spun off. Microsoft said the Seattle studio behind State of Decay transitioned on terms similar to Compulsion Games and Double Fine, which went independent in August, and that State of Decay 3 will launch on Game Pass on day one with a new publisher.

Arkane in France still has no announced outcome. It’s the last of five studios Microsoft moved to divest in July. Consultations there are expected to run through the end of the year.

Companywide job cuts

More details on Microsoft’s Washington state cuts, including the types of roles affected, will likely emerge later through a WARN notice filed with state employment officials.

The company described the reductions beyond Xbox as part of the normal course of business, as teams reevaluated their needs, with no single cause behind the layoffs. Microsoft and other big tech companies have been keeping a tight rein on operating expenses as they plow tens of billions of dollars into new AI and cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft eliminated 4,800 jobs globally in July, about 2% of its workforce, including 605 in Washington state. In 2025 it cut more than 15,000 across two rounds, about 6,000 in May and around 9,000 in July, including 830 in Washington.

The company also offered voluntary retirement for the first time this year. About 30% of roughly 8,750 eligible U.S. employees took the buyout, which reduced the size of the July layoffs.

At the same time, Microsoft continues to hire in other areas. The company said 850 university hires started in August and that it had 1,300 interns over the summer, many of whom it works to convert into full-time roles.

Microsoft’s latest cuts are part of a larger pattern across the industry and the region. Oracle eliminated 359 jobs in Washington last week, and Zillow cut more than 500 in August, its largest round of the year. Amazon, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Google, Salesforce, TikTok, Uber and Qualtrics have all made smaller cuts in the region since July.

When machinists with decades of experience retire, everything they know about how metal behaves under a cutting tool — or anything else they learned through a career of scrapped parts and expensive mistakes — walks out the door with them.

A startup with roots in Seattle, started by two founders in their 20s, is building technology to capture that knowledge long before that point.

Neuramill, founded last year by CEO Nistha Mitra and COO Nick Khormaei, is developing what the company calls an intelligence layer for high-precision manufacturing.

The software reads a design file and figures out how the part should be made: which tools, which machines, and in what order. A machinist reviews and approves every plan before anything reaches the floor.

“This is a high-skill job, and nobody’s retaining this information,” Mitra said. When the machinists who know how to build complex jet engine parts retire, she said, that knowledge goes with them. “We help retain that for the future generation.”

Khormaei said the two founders spent much of the past year visiting machine shops to watch how the work gets done.

“The craft itself is so impressive,” he said. “They’re able to look at these drawings and models that come in and know exactly how to build it. It’s like they’re doing real-time physics simulation.”

Early customers and partners: The company says it has closed a six-figure contract with a major defense contractor, one of the companies known in the industry as primes. Neuramill declined to name the contractor.

Two of the machine shops using the software are Diamond Machine Works, a Seattle precision machining company founded in 1959, and VTN Manufacturing in San Jose, Calif. Satellite maker Astranis is a design partner.

Mitra said the company is not yet selling broadly, but has been paid by some of the early customers testing the software.

How they got here: Mitra, 26, has a computer science degree from the University of Maryland and spent three years at Oracle, most recently as an AI applied scientist in Seattle, working on multimodal models that reason across several kinds of data at once.

Khormaei, 24, holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. He was a propulsion engineer at Boeing in Everett, where he worked on 777X fuel system electrical certification, and then spent part of last year at SpaceX as an integration and test engineer on Starlink manufacturing in Redmond.

He also grew up around machining. His father, Ron Khormaei, co-founded FINEX Cast Iron Cookware in Portland in 2012 and sold it to Lodge in 2019. Khormaei worked production there as a teenager.

Where the software fits in: Neuramill’s technology works at a stage that has stayed largely manual: after the design file arrives, and before a programmer opens the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software that translates decisions into machine instructions.

Rather than position the company against Siemens and Mastercam, Mitra said Neuramill plugs into those systems. The company recently joined Siemens’ Frontier Partner Program, which gives startups access to the company’s software tools.

“At this point we are very collaborative with these companies,” she said, adding that the established vendors are looking for new technology of their own.

Bay Area and Seattle: Both founders worked in the Seattle region before leaving for San Francisco, a move Mitra described to GeekWire in February. They are back every four or five weeks now, working out of Foundations, the Seattle founder hub.

“We love this ecosystem. It gave birth to Neuramill,” Mitra said. They keep coming back in part for the customers: “This is a booming ecosystem in space and in aerospace.”

Funding and team: Neuramill has raised an undisclosed amount from Ascend, Breakwater Ventures, Schema Ventures, Creative Destruction Lab, Acequia Capital and Correlation Ventures.

The team is six people plus a contractor: the two founders, a chief research scientist who worked with Mitra at Oracle, and three engineers, one of them a machinist.

What’s next: The long-term goal, Mitra said, is a “world model” for manufacturing: a system that can reason across geometry, materials and machine behavior at any level of complexity. Even then, she sees a role for the people on the shop floor.

“There is a beauty to the craft of manufacturing that we should really respect,” she said. “There are some places where humans should not be extracted out of an industry, and I think manufacturing is one of them.”

Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh each had their moment in the sun a century ago, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said Monday — and then the warning lights started flashing, and their leaders at the time failed to heed them.

“Well, here we are. It is 2026,” Smith said at a press conference, flanked by dozens of regional leaders, with the Seattle skyline behind them. “And the warning signs are flashing on our economy.”

Smith was speaking at the launch of the Partnership for a Competitive Puget Sound, a Challenge Seattle initiative that brought together roughly 50 elected officials from King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish counties — two county executives, around 20 mayors, port commissioners and about a dozen state legislators — along with labor leaders and business executives, behind a 20-point plan for reversing the region’s slide.

The region lost nearly 7,000 jobs in 2025, according to a report issued by the group, the first time in two decades outside a recession or the pandemic that Seattle-area employment growth has trailed the nation’s. Washington has fallen from 32nd to 47th in CNBC’s ranking of states by cost of doing business since 2017.

An ‘intentional’ regional tech strategy: The report makes a pointed observation about technology: aerospace has a coordinated regional agenda and tech doesn’t, despite tech accounting for nearly one in 10 regional jobs and about 24% of total payroll.

Aerospace knows what it’s working on: the next airplane, the space industry, sustainable fuels, supplier diversification. Technology, “despite being one of Puget Sound’s defining economic anchors, does not yet have an equally intentional regional strategy,” the report says.

Without one, it adds, the region risks losing “jobs, technology investment, headquarters, talent, and company growth” to the Bay Area, New York, Boston and Austin. The goal is “not simply to promote growth, but to protect and strengthen the region’s position as a leading technology center.”

Challenge Seattle says it will write that strategy with the Puget Sound Regional Council, built around two priorities: keeping the big tech companies investing here, and making it easier for startups to scale. Related recommendations target industrial space for AI hardware startups, commercial space, and the region’s fusion cluster.

The report sets no budget or measure of success for the tech strategy, and no deadline beyond its general goal of progress within three years.

A regional wake-up call: Many of the recommendations are changes to how local government operates, not new spending: deadlines for permit decisions, a designated business contact in every city and county, and a strategy for dealing with the way taxes stack across state, county and city.

“This is, for us, a wake-up call,” said former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, CEO of Challenge Seattle, launching the initiative during the press conference. “We cannot resort to relying on yesterday’s success while tomorrow’s jobs go somewhere else.”

April Sims, president of the Washington State Labor Council, said businesses need predictability and enough margin to invest, innovate and take risks — but “working people need margins, too.”

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said his office has hired an economic development team and is beginning an internal permitting audit. “AI is transforming our economy seemingly overnight,” he said, calling the 7,000 lost jobs “quite alarming.”

The group also released a playbook for Puget Sound mayors, drawn from interviews and surveys with local leaders, on building what it calls a culture of partnership with business.

Seattle as a Microsoft litmus test: Asked by GeekWire during the press conference what it would take for Microsoft to return and grow in Seattle proper, where it previously had offices in South Lake Union, Smith first pointed out that he was standing in front of Redmond Mayor Angela Birney.

“We have a great mayor, and every day we get up and we’re excited to go to work in Redmond, Washington,” he said, to laughter from the assembled officials.

Smith also pushed back on the premise: Microsoft moved to the Eastside from Albuquerque in 1979 and never had a large presence in Seattle, so he wouldn’t use the city as the point of comparison.

Then he turned to Seattle’s JumpStart payroll expense tax.

As structured, the payroll tax “is really a tax on tech jobs,” Smith said, “and that’s why you’re seeing more tech jobs move from Seattle to places like Bellevue and the Eastside.” He noted that San Francisco abolished its payroll tax the same year Seattle adopted one, in 2021.

“You should tax things you want to discourage, like cigarettes, not jobs,” he said.

He tied the issue to the larger impact of AI on jobs. “We need people to succeed to some degree in a world of AI,” Smith said. “And you don’t want to make the cost of employing people more expensive, at the same time that AI is increasingly adding its own new form of competition.”

“There’s nothing that would lead to the decline in jobs in this state faster than a replication of the JumpStart tax,” he said. “And if Seattle wanted to do one thing to increase jobs in Seattle, it ought to revisit whether a payroll tax makes any sense.”

Then he added a caveat: “That’s probably something that would impact other companies more than Microsoft.”

Amazon, which has been reported to be the largest payer of the tax, did not have a speaker at Monday’s event. Individual Amazon execs are listed in the acknowledgments in the Challenge Seattle report, though the report says participation doesn’t imply endorsement.

View from Olympia: During the press conference, Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, was asked whether Washington risks becoming an outlier among states on taxes. The Legislature has been correcting course, he said, pointing to two moves from this year’s session.

One was the estate tax. Lawmakers raised the top rate to 35% in 2025, the highest in the country, and reversed themselves this March, returning it to 20% as of July.

The other was the millionaires tax — a 9.9% tax on household income above $1 million, signed by Gov. Bob Ferguson and projected to raise roughly $3 billion a year. It doesn’t take effect until 2028, and Seattle tech leaders warned it would push founders and investors out of the state.

Pedersen cast it as the fix for a different kind of outlier status: Washington’s business and sales taxes are high because it’s one of the few states with no personal income tax at all. The new tax would let Washington “join 41 other states that have a personal income tax,” he said.

Voters get the last word in November. Initiative 645, backed by Let’s Go Washington, qualified for the ballot in July and would repeal the tax. If it survives, Pedersen said, a statewide payroll tax is “vanishingly unlikely” next session.

Seattle’s mayor weighs in: Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who was an architect of the JumpStart tax before running for office, was not among the speakers at the press conference. She opened the regional session that followed, and said the region needs to do a better job telling its own story.

“There are some forces and interests that are pushing a narrative that does not want Seattle or our region to succeed,” Wilson said, “and we must counter that with a new commitment to a shared sense of destiny, because Seattle’s success is Bellevue’s success, Pierce County’s success is Snohomish County’s success.”

She called it a fragile moment and said the time to act is now, pointing to the economic actions she announced last week in conjunction with an independent report commissioned by the city and released by Seattle’s Office of Economic Development.

That report, “Seawall: Building a Resilient Seattle Economy,” found Seattle’s tax structure unique among peer cities in the way it “specifically penalizes the hiring of senior, high-compensation workers,” with the burden falling overwhelmingly on large tech employers.

Hiring a software engineer at $650,000 in total compensation costs about $17,000 more a year in Seattle than in Bellevue at JumpStart’s top rate, the researchers found.

The city report, conducted by the economic consulting firm Formation, said Seattle should bet on cleantech, the sector where the city owns the utility, writes the building codes and controls permitting and land use. It’s one place where Seattle has real leverage over its own economy, the researchers argued.

“It’s striking how much agreement we share across labor, businesses, and government,” Wilson said. “This is not a call to ignore our challenges, but to tackle them with a shared sense of possibility.”

She did not address the payroll tax in her remarks.