Blue Origin is taking over an industrial building in Des Moines, Wash., where the Jeff Bezos-founded space company plans a mix of lab, development and light production work, the company confirmed to GeekWire.

The 265,922-square-foot facility, known as Prologis Park SeaTac 3, was previously a Bartell Drugs distribution center just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Blue Origin said that at full capacity over the long term, the site is expected to support hundreds of employees.

KING 5 first reported the news Tuesday, citing a state environmental application filed in September that lists Blue Origin Manufacturing LLC at the building’s address, 21202 24th Ave. S. A pre-application under review by the city indicates the property could be used for research and development of commercial satellites, the station reported.

Commercial real estate firm Newmark announced a lease for the entire building last week without naming the tenant.

“The manufacturing project that will be using this property is cutting-edge and we are excited about the job growth and possibilities that it represents for our region,” Newmark Executive Vice Chairman Thad Mallory said in a news release.

With roughly 33,000 residents, the small city of Des Moines is becoming something of an aerospace hub.

Blue Origin’s new location is around the corner from where Shield AI is building X-Forge 3, a 420,000-square-foot facility that will make the company’s X-BAT autonomous fighter jet. Shield AI said last month it expects to have 4,000 workers in the region by the early 2030s, and that it’s looking for another 1 million square feet.

“It’s all about labor and access to power,” Mallory told KING 5, referring to the advanced manufacturing projects coming to the area.

Blue Origin is headquartered in nearby Kent, Wash., about 5 miles from the Des Moines site.

The company is working to get its New Glenn rocket flying again after one exploded during a ground engine test in May, which damaged its Florida launch pad. New Glenn is slated to carry Blue’s Blue Moon Mark 2 lander on NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, a test in Earth orbit planned for mid-2027 ahead of a crewed moon landing targeted for 2028.

AI infrastructure startup Nscale is doubling down on its new Seattle-area presence before even opening the doors.

After initially leasing a single floor at The Eight tower in downtown Bellevue earlier this year, the London-based company has expanded by an additional floor, bringing its total footprint in the new development to approximately 46,000 rentable square feet, according to a report from The Broderick Group.

The expansion signals an aggressive ramp-up for Nscale’s primary U.S. engineering hub, slated to open in January 2027. While the initial 24,000-square-foot lease was pegged to accommodate up to 250 employees, the added space gives the fast-growing cloud provider room to scale its local team even further beyond its current 50 Seattle-area workers.

Founded in 2024, Nscale is riding a massive wave of capital and growth.

It raised a $2 billion Series C round at a $14.6 billion valuation earlier this year, backed by Nvidia, Dell, Citadel, Jane Street, and Point72, alongside a $900 million credit line.

The company also earlier this year hired Nidhi Chappell, the former Microsoft corporate vice president who led Azure AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, including the supercomputers that power ChatGPT. As Nscale’s new president of AI infrastructure, based in the Seattle area, Chappell will oversee the company’s global engineering and data center operations.

“I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the biggest moments in AI over the past several years, but one thing has always stood out: the world remembers the breakthroughs, but it’s the people building the infrastructure behind the scenes who make them possible,” Chappell wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year announcing the company’s first “onboarding” event in Seattle.

Nscale’s new office is set to open in January, with the second floor slated to open in June, reports The Puget Sound Business Journal.

The company’s growth underscores Bellevue’s growing magnetism for out-of-town AI players. The company joins a dense ecosystem of AI infrastructure and application hubs establishing outposts on the Eastside, including xAI, OpenAI, Databricks, CoreWeave, Armada, and Anduril.

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.