SoundCloud has acquired decentralized music platform Nina Protocol, months after the startup announced it would shut down. The deal brings Nina’s artists, editorial archive, and music discovery tools to SoundCloud as the company continues expanding its platform for independent musicians.
Airbus is moving 70 critical applications from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway as part of a broader digital sovereignty push to keep sensitive data "under European control." Eventually, the migration will cover 900 applications, including ERP, CRM, manufacturing execution, and product lifecycle management systems. Airbus says it will, however, continue using U.S. providers for less sensitive workloads. "We do not intend to move away from all non European solutions; we balance our choices based on the criticality of the data," the company said. The Register reports: Catherine Jestin, head of digital at Airbus, told us on Thursday: "The selection of Scaleway is a combination of a very strong technical answer and a very strong commercial offer making it competitive compared to hyperscalers' public cloud offerings. In addition, Scaleway is committed to involving Airbus in the definition of its future product roadmap." "The objective is to host Airbus's most critical applications (those required for the Minimum Viable Company). This represents 900 applications and we will start with 70 of them today hosted on AWS."
Applications being sent to Scaleway include ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management. Finding a cloud provider to host its most sensitive applications for defense and industrial workloads was not a certainty when the process began, Airbus told us last year, because European cloud providers do not have the scale of their US rivals.
Jestin said Airbus will continue to work with AWS. Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS. In a statement, she said: "By integrating a trusted, high performance, cloud environment that keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws, we are ensuring that our digital infrastructure keeps pace with our aerospace innovation, while maintaining control and resilience of our industrial operations."
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Seattle-area startups raised $2.7 billion in venture funding through the first half of 2026, across 163 deals, down about 40% from $4.5 billion in 210 deals during the same period a year ago.
The figures come from the recently released PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report for Q2 2026. The decline in capital reflects fewer deals across the board in the Seattle region, with much of the funding going to a handful of large rounds for energy, cybersecurity, and space startups.
Here is the region’s top 5 for the second quarter, as tracked in the report:
Gradial raised $65 million for its agentic enterprise software platform.
Against the AI grain: In Q2 2026 specifically, startups in the Seattle area closed 85 deals totaling $1.5 billion. That was down from 101 deals and $2.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago, but up from Q1 2026, which PitchBook revised to 78 deals and $1.2 billion as part of its regular data updates.
Heavy infrastructure investments by Microsoft and Amazon have helped to establish the Seattle area as an AI hub, but the region’s pure-play AI startups, on the whole, aren’t seeing investment on the same scale as some of their peers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the country.
That creates a disconnect with the larger U.S. venture capital market. AI companies accounted for 86% of all U.S. venture dollars in the first half of the year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA data.
Nationally, it was a record half: U.S. startups raised $412.7 billion through June, already surpassing the full-year record of $358.6 billion set in 2021. But the number is misleading. Deals of $100 million or more accounted for 87.5% of the total, and AI companies captured 86 cents of every venture dollar.
OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed roughly 43% of all global venture capital in the first half of the year, by one estimate. The Bay Area, home to both, pulled in $319 billion, about three times its H1 2025 total.
Strip out those two companies and the national picture looks very different. Seed funding fell 27% nationally in the first half, and first-time fund formation is on pace for its lowest year since 2016.
Regional trends: In that way, what’s happening in the Seattle area reflects the current realities of the market. However, the region is also slipping relative to its peers in the latest numbers.
Among the 10 largest U.S. metro areas for venture funding, Seattle ranked seventh by capital invested in the first half of the year, down from fifth in H1 2025. By deal count, the region was last in the top 10.
The data used in this analysis covers the Seattle-Tacoma combined statistical area (CSA), a broader regional boundary that includes communities beyond the core metro region.
Political climate: Washington’s shifting tax and economic landscape adds another variable.
The state now taxes capital gains at up to 9.9%, a new millionaires’ tax takes effect in 2028, and legislators this year floated taxing the federal QSBS exemption that startup founders and early employees rely on when they sell shares at exit. That bill didn’t pass, but generated enough alarm to cause a backlash from startup community leaders and investors.
Looking ahead: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based space company, is reportedly seeking up to $10 billion in what would be its first outside funding round. A deal that size would be larger than every other Seattle-area venture round this year combined.
Microsoft released its 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report showing that last year it matched its entire electricity consumption with renewable energy, reports The Register.
"The bad news is it also increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25%" — mostly due to datacenter construction and a decision to stop purchasing some renewable energy certificates:
In 2020, Microsoft set itself the goal of becoming "carbon-negative" by 2030. Its own figures show emissions heading only upwards, from 13 million tons of CO2 equivalent in 2020, to 20 million tons in 2025. However, Microsoft estimates that without the carbon reduction initiatives it has already put in place, emissions would now stand at 34 million tons...
For the first time, Microsoft claims to have replenished more [water] than it withdrew during 2025, returning 14,278 million liters (3,771 million gallons). Elsewhere, the corporation says its Circular Centers program reused 92% of decommissioned servers and their components.
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