Amazon reports third-quarter earnings Thursday afternoon with more demand for its cloud services than it can serve, driven by AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI along with growth in its traditional cloud business.

One big question for Wall Street going into the report is what Amazon might signal about next year’s spending as it tries to keep up with that demand.

CEO Andy Jassy said on an Andreessen Horowitz podcast last week that AWS capacity is largely booked for this year and next, along with “a good chunk of ’28.”

Amazon has said it expects to spend about $220 billion on capital expenditures this year, largely on AI and cloud infrastructure, up from its earlier plan of $200 billion. Even at that level, Jassy said, Amazon is “leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table.”

Past spending pushed Amazon’s free cash flow to negative $7.6 billion for the 12 months ending in June, as the cost to add data centers, chips and other equipment exceeded the cash its operations brought in. Jassy gave no indication of slowing down, saying the company “could invest a lot more and it wouldn’t be a bad use of capital.”

Core numbers: Analysts expect revenue of about $202 billion, up 12% from a year ago, according to Yahoo Finance. That’s at the top of Amazon’s own forecast of $197 billion to $202 billion.

Analysts expect earnings of $1.96 per share, about the same as a year ago.

Amazon’s sales growth will likely look slower this time, about 12%, down from 20% last quarter. A big reason is timing. Prime Day, the company’s biggest sales event of the year, fell in the second quarter this year, rather than the third quarter as it did last year, so this quarter is up against a tougher comparison.

Amazon estimated in July that the shift would take nearly 4 percentage points off its growth rate this quarter. It hits online store sales hardest: analysts expect them to grow only about 3%, according to Zacks.

AWS: Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud business, generates the majority of its operating profit. AWS revenue grew 37% to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, its fastest pace since 2021 and the fifth straight quarter of faster growth.

Analysts expect AWS revenue of about $45.4 billion this time, up 37.5%, according to Zacks. Wedbush is more optimistic, projecting growth of about 41%.

AWS had $496 billion in signed contracts it hadn’t yet delivered as of June, more than double the year before. That means its growth depends largely on how quickly Amazon can bring new data centers online.

“Capacity, not demand, is the constraint,” Yorkville Ives analyst Dan Ives wrote of the industry in a note Sunday.

Jassy said on the a16z podcast that running AI models is still “an order of magnitude too expensive” for businesses to use them widely, and that Amazon’s custom chips, including its Trainium AI processors, are a big piece of bringing that cost down. Amazon said in July that its chip business was on pace for more than $25 billion in annual revenue.

Anthropic stake: Amazon’s reported earnings could look very different. That’s because its profit fluctuates significantly depending on the value of its stake in Anthropic.

Last quarter, $53.4 billion in pre-tax gains, mostly on Anthropic, pushed Amazon’s earnings to $5.75 per share, against expectations of $1.82.

Anthropic filed paperwork Monday for a planned IPO on the Nasdaq. Amazon’s stake in the AI company was valued at about $190 billion as of June 30, according to Amazon’s latest quarterly filing. That includes about $92 billion in gains on convertible notes, a form of loan that turns into stock, which haven’t yet been counted in Amazon’s profit. Those notes would convert to Anthropic stock when it goes public.

Anthropic is also one of Amazon’s biggest cloud customers. Its IPO filing shows commitments to spend at least $110 billion on Amazon’s computing capacity into the 2030s, behind the $114.5 billion it committed to Google, as GeekWire reported Tuesday. Anthropic also said in the filing that it has asked its cloud providers for more computing power than they were willing to supply.

Shopping agents: Amazon blocked Meta’s new Muse AI agent from its store last month, escalating a fight over who controls the customer relationship when software does the buying. Amazon said Muse broke its rule requiring agents to identify themselves.

Agents that shop on a customer’s behalf could bypass Amazon’s advertising business, which depends on people browsing its pages. Ad revenue grew 26% to $19.8 billion last quarter, and analysts expect about $20.8 billion this time, up 18%, according to Zacks.

“Investor questions remain on agentic commerce risk, particularly to advertising, but we see limited risk,” Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian wrote in an Oct. 16 note, citing Amazon’s logistics advantage and its role connecting shoppers with sellers.

Amazon is trying to give shoppers fewer reasons to look elsewhere. It now lists 250 million products sold on other retailers’ sites, about 2.5 times as many as in March, The Information reported Wednesday. On the seller side, Amazon opened its tools to outside AI agents in September, starting with Anthropic’s Claude.

Cloud rivals: Microsoft and Alphabet report quarterly results Wednesday afternoon, a day before Amazon. Microsoft’s report is its first under a new structure that breaks out Azure cloud revenue every quarter.

Check back with GeekWire on Thursday afternoon for coverage.

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.

Two former Amazon real estate managers acknowledged receiving personal payments tied to data center deals they handled for the company, under a settlement that resolves the company’s claims against them in a six-year lawsuit.

Carl Nelson and Casey Kirschner “regret their actions, apologize for failing to meet Amazon’s high ethical standards, and are glad this matter has been resolved,” according to a joint statement that the parties agreed to as part of the settlement.

The payments “violated Amazon’s Code of Conduct & Ethics, broke the trust Amazon places in its employees, and put Amazon’s reputation at risk in the communities it serves,” says the statement, which Amazon provided Friday evening in response to GeekWire’s inquiry.

The statement doesn’t call the payments kickbacks or say they were illegal. Nelson was investigated by the FBI but never charged, and a federal judge ruled in 2023 that Amazon’s Code of Conduct wasn’t a legally enforceable contract. The other terms of the settlement are confidential, including whether any money changed hands.

Before the settlement, Nelson had maintained that he abided by the terms of his Amazon employment agreement, which his attorneys said gave him broad leeway to do outside business.

Rodney Atherton, a Colorado attorney who set up business entities for the two men, also settled and “regrets the role he played in the conduct at issue in this case,” according to the statement.

The settlement closes a long legal ordeal for Nelson’s family. His wife, Amy Nelson, the former Seattle entrepreneur who founded The Riveter, a network of co-working spaces for women, has been his most outspoken advocate, defending him for years on social media and in interviews and criticizing Amazon and the Justice Department for pursuing him.

“All disputes with my husband’s former employer have been resolved,” she said in a short video posted Friday on social media.

The case upended the family’s life. The FBI seized $892,135 from the Nelsons’ bank accounts in 2020, including hundreds of thousands of dollars Amy Nelson earned as CEO of The Riveter.

The government returned most of it in a 2022 settlement. By then, the Nelsons had sold their West Seattle home and emptied their retirement accounts to pay lawyers, and they had moved with their four daughters to Hawaii and then Ohio, where Amy’s parents live. The family had spent more than $3 million on legal fees, she told KIRO 7 in 2023.

“Many of the things that we lost over the past four years, we can never get back. We can never get our home back. We can never get our jobs back. We can never get our reputation back,” she told The Seattle Times in 2024, after federal prosecutors moved to drop the related criminal cases.

Amazon told the judge on Oct. 20 that it had reached the settlement, less than two weeks before the case was set to go to trial in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., according to court filings.

The case continues against the remaining defendants, Brian Watson and his Denver-based real estate firm, Northstar Commercial Partners, which Amazon hired for nine data center development projects in Northern Virginia between 2018 and 2020. Amazon alleges that Northstar won that business by paying kickbacks to Nelson and Kirschner, which Watson denies.

Watson and Northstar are headed to trial Nov. 2. In a filing Friday, they asked the judge to make Amazon hand over the settlement agreement so they can see its terms.

The settlement follows years of rulings that went both ways. In April 2023, a federal judge dismissed most of Amazon’s claims, including its breach of contract claims against Nelson and Kirschner. In September 2025, a federal appeals court revived several of the claims, including racketeering and fraud, and sent the case back for trial.

In January 2024, federal prosecutors moved to vacate the guilty pleas of two other men in the case, Kirschner’s brother, Christian Kirschner, and former Northstar account manager Kyle Ramstetter, calling prosecution “not in the best interests of justice.”

Prosecutors added that they had declined to prosecute the other alleged co-conspirators, including Nelson.

Amazon says it plans to hire more than 300,000 people for seasonal, part-time and full-time roles across its U.S. operations this holiday season, an increase of 20% from last year and its largest holiday hiring target on record.

The increase reflects a mix of factors, including new sites opening across the country as Amazon expands its operations network, a spokesperson said in response to questions.

Amazon is moving in the opposite direction from the rest of retail. Retailers added the fewest seasonal workers since 2008 last holiday season, and outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas expects even fewer this year, citing automation and uncertain holiday spending as tariffs keep prices high.

UPS plans to hire more than 100,000 seasonal workers, about 9% fewer than last year, according to Reuters, after cutting the volume it handles for Amazon, which now delivers most of its own packages. Target and Walmart haven’t announced national hiring goals.

Amazon’s sales volume has picked up this year. Worldwide paid units, a measure of items sold on Amazon, grew 17% year-over-year in the second quarter, up from 12% a year earlier, according to its second-quarter earnings release.

CEO Andy Jassy said in the earnings release that Amazon set record delivery speeds for Prime members in the first half of the year, with “over 40% more items delivered same-day or overnight.”

Amazon also said Tuesday that seasonal employees who work at least 30 hours a week will be eligible for healthcare from their first day, starting Jan. 1. Seasonal workers previously had to wait 90 days for coverage, meaning that many holiday hires could finish their seasonal jobs before they became eligible.

The change doesn’t apply to the upcoming peak season, but workers hired over the holidays who are still in qualifying roles on Jan. 1 will gain coverage that day, the company said.

Seasonal workers earn an average of $20 an hour. Full-time operations employees start at a minimum of $20 an hour, and average pay across Amazon’s operations workforce is nearly $24, following a pay increase Amazon announced last month.

The hiring push for Amazon’s fulfillment centers and delivery stations comes as the company shrinks its corporate workforce. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs in January, bringing its total reductions to about 30,000 since October 2025.

Amazon had about 1.6 million employees as of June 30, up 3% from a year earlier, excluding contractors and temporary workers. The company reports third-quarter results Oct. 29.

A new software tool from Amazon aims to make switching from Nvidia to the company’s own AI chips about as simple as changing a setting.

The software, dubbed TorchNeuron, runs code written in PyTorch, the open-source framework used by many AI developers, on Amazon’s Trainium chips. It has been in private beta since late last year, and Amazon said Monday that it’s opening the software to all developers as a public beta.

Until now, developers who wanted to run PyTorch code on Trainium had to modify it to call programming interfaces specific to Amazon’s chips, said Colin Brace, vice president of technology software at Annapurna Labs, Amazon’s chip-design unit. With TorchNeuron, the same code runs after a basic configuration change.

“If you know PyTorch, then you know Trainium,” Brace said in an interview.

Nvidia dominates the market for AI chips, partly because much of the industry’s AI software was built around its CUDA platform. Adapting that code to other hardware can take months of engineering work. That has made many companies reluctant to switch, even as Amazon, Google and others have developed their own chips.

TorchNeuron is part of a broader push by tech giants to loosen Nvidia’s grip on AI computing, even as they remain among its biggest customers.

• Google, which has started selling its TPU chips directly to some outside customers, is working on TorchTPU, a similar project to run PyTorch natively on those chips. Google detailed the effort in April, saying the goal is to let developers move existing PyTorch code to TPUs with minimal changes.
• Microsoft said last week that it plans to run most of its AI services on its homegrown Maia chips rather than Nvidia hardware.
• Amazon is reportedly in talks to acquire Decart, a startup that makes software to help developers move AI models built for Nvidia chips to alternatives such as Trainium, in a deal that could value it at about $7 billion. Decart already runs its own AI models on Trainium, and Nvidia is an investor in the startup.

Asked about Amazon’s relationship with Nvidia, Brace said the company has “always been about choice,” pointing to another high-profile example: AWS offers Intel processors alongside its own Graviton chips.

Amazon plans to release TorchNeuron as open-source software on Tuesday in conjunction with the PyTorch Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Trainium’s biggest users so far are AI labs with close financial ties to Amazon. Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested billions, uses the chips to train and run its Claude models. OpenAI agreed in February to use 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity as part of a deal in which Amazon is investing $50 billion in the company.

Brace said Amazon’s goal has always been wide use of the chips, calling TorchNeuron “an accelerant” along those lines.

Amazon’s chip business traces back to its 2015 acquisition of Annapurna Labs, an Israeli chipmaker, for a reported $350 million. The Annapurna team went on to design Trainium as well as Amazon’s Graviton processors.

In his annual shareholder letter in April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the company’s chip business, including Trainium and Graviton, had an annual revenue run rate of more than $20 billion. He estimated that figure would be about $50 billion if the chips were sold to AWS and other customers by a standalone chip business.

“There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future,” he wrote.

More than 30 companies and internal Amazon teams have been using TorchNeuron during the private beta. Deepgram, a San Francisco startup that makes speech AI, says its benchmarks showed Trainium processing about 60% more audio per dollar than its existing GPU setup. The company now runs Trainium in production, Brace said.

Inside Amazon, the Prime Video team used TorchNeuron to build Prime 360, an AI system that reconstructs NBA plays in 3D so viewers can watch replays from angles a traditional camera can’t capture. The feature, which runs on Trainium, will appear on select Prime Video broadcasts this NBA season.

To make sure TorchNeuron works with the huge variety of AI models that developers build, Amazon tests it every night against more than 100,000 models from Hugging Face, the popular online hub for open-source AI, Brace said.

Brace said the timing of the project reflects changes in PyTorch itself. The framework has matured, and its maintainers have been working to make it less dependent on any one kind of hardware.

Amazon has contributed to that effort, removing code that tied PyTorch to specific chips. Newer versions of PyTorch can detect which hardware they’re running on, he said, so in some cases developers don’t need to change their code at all.

Amazon’s new Bee AI devices ask the wrong person for consent, according to a privacy and security veteran who previously worked as a senior principal security engineer at Amazon Web Services.

In a LinkedIn article, Jeff Williams writes that Bee’s consent safeguards are aimed at the wearer, while the people being recorded have no practical way to say no.

Amazon unveiled the devices Thursday, the first new Bee hardware since it acquired the San Francisco startup last year. The $74.99 Bee Frontier goes on the wrist or clips to clothing, and the $99.99 Bee Eclipse snaps onto the back of a phone.

Both turn conversations into summaries and to-do lists, with connections to Amazon.com and Alexa+ for paid subscribers.

How Bee handles consent: Amazon says users are prompted to get permission from call participants each time they start a recording, and the devices show an indicator light while in use.

The problem, Williams says, is that neither one reliably tells the other people in a conversation that they’re being recorded. He writes that the prompt appears only on the wearer’s phone, and nothing enforces it.

“A prompt instructing the user to obtain permission is a liability allocation,” he wrote, arguing that Amazon is shifting responsibility for obtaining consent onto the wearer.

The light is easy to hide under a sleeve or in a pocket, he notes, and a device on the wrist or phone sits outside the frame on a video call.

Williams points to Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses as an example. In September, the data protection authority in Hamburg, Germany, found the glasses’ recording light hard to see outdoors and concluded that a recording indicator alone doesn’t establish informed consent under Europe’s GDPR.

In the U.S., about a dozen states, including Washington state and California, generally require consent from everyone before a private conversation can be recorded.

Whose data is protected: Williams gives Amazon credit for Bee Private Compute, which processes audio in an isolated, encrypted environment built on AWS Nitro and then deletes it. Amazon says only the customer can access the resulting data, not Amazon or Bee.

But that protects the wearer. The words of the people around the wearer still end up in transcripts and summaries they can’t see or remove. Amazon says those speakers aren’t identified by name unless they complete a voice training exercise with the device’s owner.

Williams notes that Amazon has changed comparable privacy commitments before, such as ending the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” option on some Echo devices last year.

Williams also advises companies to keep the devices out of client meetings and privileged discussions, since the transcripts end up in an employee’s personal account, where the company can’t see or manage them.

A proposed fix: Williams says Bee should leave other people’s voices out of transcripts by default, unless they’ve enrolled their voices and agreed to be recorded. Before the acquisition, Bee indicated plans to record only the voices of people who had verbally consented, according to TechCrunch.

“I know first-hand that Amazon has the engineering talent to ship it,” he wrote.

Amazon’s response: The company didn’t comment directly on the critique but pointed to safeguards built into the devices.

One is an automatic shutoff: the devices turn off if they don’t detect the owner’s voice for 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, depending on the user’s setting. Amazon says that reinforces that Bee is “a personal AI assistant, not a device designed to passively pick up audio throughout the day.”

The company says it educates customers about responsible use in the Bee app, and that Eclipse will send push notifications encouraging users to let people around them know they’re using Bee and to ask for permission.

Williams, now chief information security officer at Sigma360, worked at AWS from 2023 to 2025 and spent more than 12 years at Microsoft before that, including as a privacy officer for its services business. Read his full article on LinkedIn. Read his full article on LinkedIn.

Amazon is bringing a new AI-powered camera system to the court as the tech giant gets ready to tip off its second season of basketball coverage on Prime Video.

Called Prime 360, the technology uses an array of high-resolution cameras positioned around the arena to capture plays from multiple angles. Amazon’s proprietary AI models then process the footage to create highlight replays that the company says traditional cameras can’t replicate.

The feature will appear during live games and as an analysis tool on the pregame, halftime and postgame shows for select broadcasts. Amazon said it built the system with a team of producers, engineers and AI scientists, using its in-house AWS Trainium chips.

“Think of it like a video game camera,” Josh Green, an associate producer, said in an Amazon video describing the tech (below).

The cameras are calibrated and synchronized, and their footage is sent to the AWS cloud, where each play is reconstructed as a 3D scene — opening up possibilities beyond a normal replay.

“I want to see this play again, and you could actually fly the camera through the play,” said Wade Wakashige, a director of product. The view gives fans at home “something that the customer in the arena can’t see,” he added.

Introducing Prime 360 🎥

Prime Video's proprietary, AI-powered technology that utilizes an array of high-res cameras around the court and AWS Trainium chips to deliver cinematic highlights you've never seen before! pic.twitter.com/mOlikDb45u

— Sports on Prime (@SportsonPrime) October 14, 2026

Prime Video is also adding a fantasy basketball integration with Yahoo Sports. Viewers who link their accounts will see their fantasy rosters and real-time stats on screen during games. They’ll also get recommendations for live and upcoming games featuring players on their teams.

Amazon debuted “NBA on Prime” last October with a Celtics-Knicks game — reviewed by GeekWire — the first under an 11-year deal that gives the company exclusive rights to select regular-season and playoff games. Bloomberg reported that Amazon is paying about $1.8 billion annually for the rights.

This season, Amazon says it will stream more than 100 regular-season and postseason games. In the playoffs, that includes the Play-In Tournament exclusively, select first- and second-round games, and, for the first time, exclusive coverage of the Eastern Conference Finals.

Several tech-driven extras from the first season are back. Fans can again track their active FanDuel bets during broadcasts, though they still can’t place wagers through Prime Video. The Prime Vision alternate stream returns as well, serving as a testing ground for AI-powered stats and graphics, such as flagging offensive players in position to score, that can graduate to the main broadcast.

The “NBA on Prime” season opener is Oct. 23, with a doubleheader: the defending champion New York Knicks host the Boston Celtics at 4 p.m. PT, followed by the Houston Rockets against the San Antonio Spurs in Austin at 6:30 p.m. PT.

The programming is included with a Prime membership, which costs $139 a year or $14.99 a month. Games stream in English and Spanish on the Prime Video app and the web.

Microsoft committed $10 million to President Trump’s White House ballroom project, and Amazon and T-Mobile each chipped in $5 million, according to an internal donor list obtained by the Washington Post and reported by the newspaper Thursday morning.

The commitments are drawing scrutiny because the ballroom donations aren’t subject to campaign finance limits or disclosure requirements. The money goes through a nonprofit, the Trust for the National Mall, into a White House account the president directly controls.

Of the $333 million raised so far, the vast majority came from companies and wealthy people with interests before the federal government, the Post found, raising concerns among experts that companies could be buying influence with the administration, or feeling pressured to give.

The White House publicly named Microsoft, Amazon and T-Mobile among the ballroom’s donors last October but didn’t disclose the amounts. Other donors asked to keep their names out of it entirely, the Post found, including a subsidiary of mortgage lender Rocket, which committed $10 million weeks after a federal agency approved its acquisition of Mr. Cooper.

The Seattle-area companies have a wide range of dealings with the government as suppliers, regulated businesses and targets of federal scrutiny. Microsoft and Amazon are two of the federal government’s largest technology providers, and T-Mobile requires regulatory approval across its business, from wireless spectrum to acquisitions.

Amazon is facing an FTC antitrust trial next year, focused on its treatment of third-party sellers on its online marketplace. The FTC and 22 states also sued Amazon in August, accusing it of rigging ad auctions to overcharge advertisers.

Microsoft is at odds with Vice President JD Vance and the Labor Department over claims that the company laid off American workers while sponsoring foreign workers for permanent residency, leading the department to suspend the company from the program.

Apple and Nvidia were among the top contributors at $25 million each, according to the list of 67 donations above $10,000. Microsoft’s $10 million puts it in the next tier with Palantir and Lockheed Martin, while Amazon and T-Mobile joined Meta, Cisco and ServiceNow at $5 million.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Post that the donors are “a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.”

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company didn’t have a comment beyond what has been publicly reported. We’ve contacted Amazon and T-Mobile for comment.

Bee, the AI wearables startup Amazon acquired last year, makes devices that remember what people say in everyday conversations. A new update, announced Thursday morning, includes a feature that turns those passing remarks into shopping suggestions on Amazon.com.

For example, as described by Amazon, someone might mention offhand that they’re out of dish soap, and a product recommendation would show up on Amazon.com and in the Bee mobile and desktop apps. Amazon pitches it as a way for people to remember to buy things they need.

It’s the kind of thing many people have long suspected their phones of doing secretly, listening to conversations and serving up related content or ads. Researchers haven’t found evidence of that. Either way, Amazon’s twist is to do it openly — and to make it voluntary.

The feature is opt-in, meaning it won’t happen unless users choose to connect their Bee accounts to Amazon.com, and Bee says it won’t share data with Amazon without user consent.

The Amazon.com integration requires Bee Pro, a $12 monthly subscription that also includes unlimited conversation summaries and the ability to ask Alexa+ about things Bee has captured.

New hardware: The feature is part of a broader announcement that includes the first new Bee devices under Amazon’s ownership: Bee Frontier, a $74.99 wristband that can also clip onto clothing, and Bee Eclipse, which attaches magnetically to the back of a phone and starts at $99.99.

Bee Frontier, available now, has dual microphones, up to seven days of battery life and IP67 water resistance. Bee Eclipse, about the size of a credit card, runs more than 21 days on a charge and will be available soon, Amazon says.

Amazon says Bee lets people pay attention to a conversation instead of taking notes, keeping track of details such as when and where they agreed to meet a friend. The devices turn conversations into summaries, to-dos and reminders.

Users can read their summaries in the Bee mobile app or a new desktop app, formatted for different kinds of conversations, such as lectures, care plans and brainstorming sessions. Bee also picks up on recurring themes in conversations and suggests goals and actions.

Bee connects to apps including Gmail, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. After a call or meeting, it can list action items, draft follow-up emails or create calendar invites based on the conversation.

Users can also link Bee to Apple HealthKit and to their photos. Most of those features, including the desktop app and third-party integrations, also require Bee Pro.

Without a subscription, Bee users get conversation summaries and 14 days of memory. New customers get 30 days of Bee Pro free.

How Bee handles privacy: Amazon says Bee runs on a system it calls Bee Private Compute, which processes conversations in an isolated environment where “no one, including Amazon, can access your data.” Audio is deleted after it’s processed, and transcripts are encrypted with keys controlled by the user’s device.

Both new devices turn on and off with a single button and show a light when they’re running. For phone calls, Bee Eclipse prompts users to get permission from the other people on the call each time it starts, according to Amazon.

Bee and Amazon: Amazon acquired Bee in July 2025 for an undisclosed price. At the time, the San Francisco startup, led by co-founders Maria de Lourdes Zollo and Ethan Sutin, had raised $7 million and sold a $49.99 wristband called Bee Pioneer.

Thursday’s update connects Bee to two of Amazon’s biggest consumer businesses: its online store, through the product recommendations; and Alexa+, the new version of its longtime voice assistant, by letting users ask Alexa+ on an Echo device about things Bee has captured.

Amazon isn’t the only tech giant betting on AI devices.

• Apple last month announced Siri Recap, an opt-in feature that summarizes conversations on its new Apple Watches, set to arrive in beta later this year.
• Meta bought Limitless, maker of a conversation-recording pendant, in December 2025, and last month unveiled the Muse Charm, a keychain-sized device for its Muse AI agent that’s set to ship this December.
• OpenAI is developing its own hardware with former Apple designer Jony Ive.

Bee also competes with startups such as Plaud, Omi and Friend, which make AI recorders and pendants that listen to conversations, and with AI notetaking apps such as Granola and Otter that work on a phone, with no extra device required.

On another front, Amazon is fighting to keep other companies’ AI agents out of its store. Last month it blocked Meta’s Muse assistant from shopping on Amazon.com, after earlier moves against shopping agents from Perplexity, Google and OpenAI.

Apple is going after Amazon’s smart home business on several fronts at once.

The iPhone and iPad maker on Tuesday unveiled HomeView, a $299 smart display that competes directly with Amazon’s Echo Show, along with a lineup of cameras, a video doorbell and a smart lock made by LG Electronics. That puts Apple in the core categories of Amazon-owned Ring for the first time.

Apple also announced a new Apple TV 4K and the HomePod mini 2, which will go up against Amazon’s Fire TV and Echo speakers.

Amazon made its own move into Apple’s territory last week, unveiling premium Alexa Tablets, including a Pro model that competes more directly with the iPad.

The new Apple HomeView has a 7-inch screen and comes in a tabletop version with a speaker base and a wall-mounted version. It recognizes up to six household members by their faces and switches to each person’s messages, calendar and apps.

It runs Siri AI, Apple’s rebuilt version of its voice assistant, which the company calls “profoundly more capable and conversational.” Pre-orders started Tuesday, and the device ships Nov. 13.

Amazon’s big lead: About two-thirds of U.S. smart speaker owners have an Amazon device, compared with about a quarter for Google and 7% for Apple, according to the latest data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, covering the 12 months ending in June. Apple’s share has stayed in the mid-single digits for years.

CIRP’s Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz wrote that Apple may go after people who don’t own a smart speaker rather than try to convert Amazon and Google customers. Only 57% of recent Apple buyers have a smart speaker of any kind, the firm found.

The HomeView is aimed at people already using Apple devices. Setup and the personal features require an iPhone or iPad. It won’t be sold in the European Union because Siri AI isn’t available there.

Apple is also hinting that its AI won’t stay free. A footnote in the HomeView announcement says certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily limits, with expanded access “available for a fee in the future.” Amazon’s Alexa+ is free with Prime or $19.99 a month on its own.

Competition for Ring: The new Apple Home Collection, designed with LG and Schneider Electric, includes a $249.95 LG video doorbell with two cameras, LG indoor, outdoor and floodlight cameras priced from $199.95 to $399.95, and a $349.95 LG deadbolt that unlocks automatically as its owner approaches, using ultra-wideband technology.

The accessories are set for release starting in December, with some arriving in early 2027.

Camera video history requires an iCloud+ storage plan, and Apple says there’s no separate camera subscription. Apple’s retail stores will also offer installation by ADT for an extra charge.

The LG lock was announced a week after Ring unveiled its first smart lock, a $249 deadbolt with no keyhole and a hand-turned dial that revives a dead battery. It’s due in the first quarter of next year. Ring also announced five new cameras priced from $69.99 to $219.99.

The LG lock includes a backup key slot. “If you have to have a key, it’s like, well, why have a smart lock?” Ring founder Jamie Siminoff told GeekWire last week.

A deal for Decart, a startup that makes software to help AI models run faster on different kinds of chips, would give Amazon new ways of getting more AI developers to use its custom chips instead of Nvidia hardware.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that the companies are in talks for an acquisition that could value Decart around $7 billion, citing people familiar with the matter. Amazon and Decart haven’t confirmed the talks. Amazon hasn’t responded to GeekWire’s request for comment.

A deal of that size would rank among Amazon’s largest. The company paid $13.7 billion for Whole Foods in 2017 and $8.45 billion for MGM in 2022, and in April it agreed to buy Globalstar, a satellite company, for $11.57 billion.

It would also be far larger than the deal that started Amazon’s chip business. Amazon bought Israeli chipmaker Annapurna Labs in 2015 for a reported $350 million. That team went on to design Trainium and Amazon’s other custom chips, now linchpins of its cloud business.

Decart hasn’t disclosed its revenue but has been profitable almost from the start, according to the business publication Globes. Its customers include eBay, which is also an investor, according to Bloomberg. CTech reported that Decart’s business remains far smaller than the valuation being discussed.

Nvidia dominates the AI chip market in large part because of CUDA, the software that developers have used for years to build and run AI models. Moving that work to other chips, including Amazon’s Trainium, normally takes extra engineering work.

What Decart does: Decart sells software that makes AI models run faster on chips from Nvidia, Google and Amazon, and makes it easier for developers to switch between them, according to the Journal. It licenses that technology to cloud providers and AI labs.

The company also builds its own AI models, including Lucy, which edits live video in real time, and Oasis, which generates interactive virtual worlds. Brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf founded Decart in 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company is based in San Francisco, with a development center in Tel Aviv.

For Amazon, owning Decart could make Trainium an easier sell. Customers with AI models built for Nvidia chips could run them on Trainium with fewer changes, and Amazon would get the engineers behind the technology.

Decart’s software could also help Amazon get more out of the chips it already has. That was Anthropic’s goal in pursuing the startup, according to Bloomberg.

The company’s video models could fit other Amazon businesses, too. Streamers use its technology on Twitch, which Amazon owns. Its Lucy model can show online shoppers how clothes look on them.

Existing ties to AWS: Decart has already moved its own models to Trainium.

At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last December, Decart’s real-time video model turned AWS Senior Vice President Peter DeSantis into a live cartoon of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on the side screens as he opened his keynote. It was a joke about taking over a morning slot that attendees expected Vogels to fill.

When Decart CEO Dean Leitersdorf took the stage later, the model animated him, too, mimicking his movements. The animations were generated live on Trainium3, Amazon’s newest AI chip.

Leitersdorf said the startup worked with AWS to move its models and infrastructure to Trainium. Amazon said that week that Decart was running real-time video four times faster on Trainium at half the cost of GPUs.

Earlier suitors: Amazon isn’t the first company to pursue Decart. Anthropic was in talks to buy the startup for about $6 billion, Bloomberg reported in August, and Nvidia held acquisition talks before that, according to the tech publication CTech.

Nvidia also invested in Decart’s $300 million funding round in May, which valued the startup at about $4 billion.

Anthropic walked away in September after due diligence, Bloomberg reported, adding that the companies may still work together in other ways. Globes, citing sources close to Decart, reported that the founders had refused Anthropic’s push to move much of the company’s team from Tel Aviv to San Francisco.

Anthropic is one of Amazon’s closest AI partners. Amazon has invested about $18 billion in Anthropic and could invest up to $15 billion more as certain milestones are met. Anthropic uses Amazon’s Trainium chips to train and run its Claude models.

Larger industry moves: Amazon isn’t alone in trying to reduce its reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft on Monday unveiled Maia 300, the third generation of its custom AI chip, and said it plans to make Maia the main hardware for running AI in its own products starting in 2027.

Google has its TPU chips, and OpenAI has developed a chip with Broadcom.

A deal for Decart could come together soon, according to the Journal, unless talks fall apart or another suitor emerges. One open question is whether Decart’s software would keep supporting Nvidia and Google chips under Amazon ownership.

Nicolas Cage is drawing a hard line in the digital sand against artificial intelligence, revealing that he likely won’t work with Amazon again after refusing to sign an AI waiver for his now-canceled Prime Video series “Spider-Noir.”

Speaking during a panel at New York Comic Con over the weekend, the actor didn’t mince words about his clash with the studio.

“Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI,” Cage told the crowd, according to The Wrap. “I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it’s like, connect those dots! I’m not a member of their club. I didn’t sign the waiver to let them use AI on ‘Spider Noir.’ I’m probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that’s OK.”

Inspired by the Marvel Comics character, “Spider-Noir” starred Cage as Ben Reilly, an aging, down-on-his-luck private investigator in 1930s New York City who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city’s lone super-powered vigilante.

Despite garnering 11 Emmy Award nominations, Prime Video abruptly canceled the series after just a single eight-episode season.

Cage is famous for boundary-pushing roles in classics like “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Face/Off,” and “National Treasure.” The Oscar winner teased his next pivot to the small screen, hinting that he is set to star in Season 5 of HBO’s anthology crime drama “True Detective.”

And Cage’s anti-AI stance appears to be shaping his future creative ambitions, with Kotaku reporting that the actor expressed a desire to team up with younger, DIY-reared directors — specifically shouting out 21-year-old YouTube sensation Kane Parsons, creator of the viral “Backrooms” series — who honed their skills online and share his deep skepticism toward generative tech.

“They’re doing it from scratch and by hand,” Cage said. “I want to get with that.”

When Jeff Bezos sat down on Blue Origin’s Cape Canaveral factory floor for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier earlier this week, he laid out an unapologetic defense of free enterprise and wealth creation.

“Success is not villainy,” Bezos said.

The Amazon founder’s point was simple: building a massively successful enterprise isn’t something society should apologize for or view with suspicion, it’s the natural result of creating something people actually want.

“There’s nothing wrong with making unbelievably good chicken that people love,” Bezos said, referencing the growth of Raising Cane’s and why restaurant entrepreneurs deserve their wealth. “And it doesn’t make him a bad person.”

Bezos, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021 and left Seattle for Miami in 2023, is currently the second richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $380 billion, according to Forbes.

Bezos and Amazon transformed the Seattle region. The company now employs roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers in the Puget Sound region, divided between its primary headquarters in Seattle and its growing operational footprint in Bellevue.

And his recent comments come at a key moment for Washington state, where voters will decide on Initiative 645 — a high-profile ballot measure aimed at repealing the state’s recently enacted high-earner tax and prohibiting future income taxes.

Bezos, along with other business leaders like former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, have claimed that scapegoating wealthy entrepreneurs risks driving away innovation. Bezos argued that politicians targeting business leaders are misdiagnosing the problem, noting that while affordability and social challenges are real, heavy-handed government interventions often fail to solve them.

“If there’s a politician who’s picking villains and pointing fingers, that probably means they don’t have a solution,” Bezos said. He noted that executives who relied on blame-shifting inside his own companies “wouldn’t be in our company for long.”

Watch the full interview below where Bezos also discusses the impact of AI on jobs, the need to beat China in the race to the moon and orbital data centers in space. The portion of the interview where Bezos notes that “success is not villainy” starts in minute 16.

After more than a decade of focusing on low-cost devices, Amazon is taking its tablets upmarket and moving them to Android, setting up a more direct challenge to Apple’s iPad.

The company on Thursday unveiled Amazon Alexa Tablets, a new line of aluminum tablets with full access to the Google Play Store. That’s a break from Amazon’s longstanding Fire tablet line, which runs the company’s own Fire OS and relies on the Amazon Appstore for apps.

It’s the biggest change to Amazon’s tablets since Panos Panay — who previously led the Surface hardware line as part of his larger role at Microsoft — moved over to lead Amazon’s devices business in 2023.

The top model, the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, pairs a 12-inch display with a pen and a keyboard that snaps on magnetically, a setup that will look familiar to Surface Pro users.

The 12 Pro starts at $499.99, or $549.99 with an anti-glare display Amazon calls Nanomatte. The Pro Keyboard costs $149.99 and the Pro Pen $89.99, so a base Nanomatte model with both accessories comes to nearly $790.

The other two models in the Thursday announcement are the Alexa Tablet 11, which starts at $329.99, and the Alexa Tablet 8, starting at $229.99. All three go on sale Oct. 14 in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Following Amazon’s traditional naming scheme, the numbers refer to approximate screen size, not version.

Alexa and Kindle: Alexa+, the company’s generative AI assistant, is built into all three models. A feature called On-Screen Intelligence lets Alexa read what’s on the screen and act on it, such as pulling the dates from a game schedule into a calendar and flagging conflicts.

Live sessions allow a continuous conversation without repeating the wake word, with the option to share the screen as it changes.

Addressing potential privacy concerns, Amazon says the screen-reading features are off by default and require users to opt in, with a visual indicator whenever Alexa can see the screen.

Opening the Kindle app switches the tablets into a reading mode that silences notifications, reduces blue light and extends battery life to as much as 20 hours, according to a blog post by Kevin Keith, an Amazon vice president. Annotations made in books with the Pro Pen sync to Kindle Scribe.

Farewell, Fire: The new tablets don’t carry the Fire name, and Amazon’s announcement doesn’t mention Fire at all. Asked about the future of the line, an Amazon spokesperson said in an email that Fire tablets will keep working and customers will keep access to their apps and content.

“The Alexa Tablets are a new product line built for what’s next — they don’t change anything about the experience Fire tablet owners have today,” the spokesperson said, adding that Amazon will provide at least four years of support “after the last Fire tablet we sell.”

The move tests a strategy that dates back to the original Kindle Fire. Amazon kept its tablet prices low and counted on owners to buy books, videos, music and apps through its own stores.

“We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices,” Jeff Bezos, then Amazon’s CEO, said when the company unveiled the Kindle Fire HD in 2012.

With Google Play on board, Amazon gives up some of that control while charging more for the hardware. The new tablets still put Amazon’s own services up front, including Prime Video, Kindle, Audible and Amazon Music, along with a personalized home screen that surfaces Amazon content.

The lineup puts Amazon in more direct competition with Apple, whose iPad leads the higher-end tablet market, and Samsung, the biggest seller of Android tablets. The 12 Pro will also compete with Microsoft’s Surface Pro, the device that set the template for a tablet with a snap-on keyboard and pen.

Inside the devices: All three tablets use MediaTek processors, according to the company — the Dimensity 8400 in the 12 Pro, and the MediaTek 8189 in the 11 and 8. Amazon says the 12 Pro is nearly three times faster at processing and nine times faster at graphics than any tablet it has shipped. It has up to 16GB of RAM, a 120Hz display and up to 16 hours of video playback.

Amazon worked with Corning on the Nanomatte glass, which uses a photolithography process to etch a texture into the glass aligned with the pixels beneath it. Conventional matte screens are sandblasted, which scatters light unevenly.

Amazon is also releasing Amazon Kids Tablets in 8.7-inch and 11-inch sizes, bundled with a kid-proof case and a year of Amazon Kids+, its subscription service for children’s books, videos and games.

The tablets go on sale Oct. 19 in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and will also be sold at Best Buy and Target.

Amazon laid off hundreds of employees this week in its Stores business, which runs the company’s main e-commerce site — the latest in a series of smaller job cuts in recent months.

Customer service, selling partner support and retail engineering teams were among those hit, according to internal Slack posts viewed by Business Insider and Reuters. Both outlets reported that fewer than 1,000 employees were impacted, citing people familiar with the matter.

The cuts came during Prime Big Deal Days, which ran Tuesday and Wednesday. The fall shopping event is one of the key annual milestones for Amazon’s retail team.

“We’re always looking at our team structures to ensure we’re best set up to move fast as we innovate for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement Wednesday night. “We’ve adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities.”

Amazon didn’t provide further details on the changes. The statement continued, “As part of these changes, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles, and we’re committed to supporting affected employees through their transition.”

The internal Slack posts suggested that affected employees were in the U.S., India and the UK, according to Business Insider. Amazon hasn’t yet filed a notice with Washington’s Employment Security Department, which is required when a company lays off 50 or more workers in the state.

Amazon’s online store sales rose 15% to $70.4 billion in the second quarter, and revenue from third-party seller services grew 16% to $46.8 billion. Together, they accounted for 58% of the company’s $200.6 billion in total revenue for the quarter.

The cuts follow Amazon’s elimination of about 30,000 corporate jobs in October 2025 and January 2026, the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history. Amazon has made smaller cuts since then, including in its robotics and artificial general intelligence groups.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, addressed the earlier cuts in a Fox News interview that aired Wednesday. Bezos has predicted that AI will make the economy so productive that many people won’t need to work as much, making it hard for companies to hire.

Asked by Bret Baier how Amazon’s 30,000 job cuts fit with that view, he said the company was “in a very special position” after hiring so many people during the pandemic. “The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our headcount,” he said.

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 

Ring is moving from the doorbell to the deadbolt.

The Amazon-owned company on Wednesday announced its first smart lock, a $249 deadbolt with no keyhole and a dial that recharges a dead battery by hand.

Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s founder and chief inventor, said the dial solves the problem that has kept smart locks from catching on the way video doorbells have: when the battery dies, the owner can be locked out. That’s why many smart locks still come with a key.

“If you have to have a key, it’s like, well, why have a smart lock?” Siminoff said in an interview before the announcement.

Twisting the dial somewhere around five to 10 times (depending on how far and how fast it’s turned), generates enough power to turn the lock back on. The light turns green when it’s ready, and the owner can then get in with a fingerprint, the keypad or the Ring app.

Other smart locks offer backups such as terminals for a 9-volt battery or a USB-C port. Those don’t help someone standing at the door at 1 a.m. without a battery or a cable, Siminoff pointed out.

The Ring Smart Lock is due to ship in the first quarter of next year. It runs on a standard Ring battery pack that should last about a year, Siminoff said, and none of its features requires a subscription.

It connects through Amazon Sidewalk, a shared network powered by nearby Amazon devices, and works with Alexa for voice commands and connections to other smart home devices.

The landscape: Ring is entering a market that includes established lock makers such as Schlage, Yale and Aqara. Apple is also preparing its own smart home push, which will include a smart deadbolt lock, video doorbell and security cameras developed with LG Electronics and sold under the LG brand, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Apple plans to introduce its own smart home devices Oct. 13, and the LG products aren’t expected to reach consumers for at least a few more months, according to the report. The LG lock supports ultra-wideband, a technology that lets a door unlock automatically as its owner approaches, Bloomberg reported.

Why Ring waited: Siminoff’s first video doorbell, the Doorbot, went on sale in 2013 in a bundle with a smart lock from another company, he said. Ring has since integrated its products with other companies’ locks.

Ring could have put its name on a lock and sold plenty of them, Siminoff said, but he didn’t think the company belonged in the business until it had something different to offer.

The parts inside the new lock are mostly off the shelf, he said, including the components that generate power. The invention was putting them together, and Siminoff said he’s annoyed with himself for not doing it years ago.

“I literally can’t believe that I just didn’t look at this and just fix the damn thing,” he said.

Siminoff, who returned to lead Ring last year, said he worked out the idea on his own computer at night using Amazon’s AI tools, estimating the number of cranks, the cost and whether the parts would fit before handing it to Ring’s engineers. A few years ago, he said, answering those questions would have taken five to 10 engineers and six months.

Privacy and the front door: The lock arrives after a difficult stretch for Ring on privacy. A Super Bowl ad in February for Search Party, a feature that uses AI to scan footage from neighbors’ outdoor cameras for lost dogs, drew a backlash from critics who asked what would stop the same technology from being used to find people.

Days later, Ring canceled a planned partnership with Flock Safety, the license-plate-recognition company, that would have let police using Flock’s platform request video from Ring users. Ring said at the time that the integration never launched and no customer videos were shared.

Asked what he would say to customers wary of giving Ring control of the door itself, Siminoff pointed to Throw Away the Key Encryption, or TAKE, which Ring started rolling out in September and says will become its default. Ring deletes its copies of the encryption keys, the digital codes needed to view customers’ videos, after using them, leaving the keys on customers’ own devices.

“You do not need to compromise on privacy in order to have security,” he said.

At launch, the lock and Ring’s cameras will work together in limited ways. The lock’s activity will show up in the Ring app alongside the company’s doorbells, cameras and alarms, and an owner who sees a visitor on a doorbell camera can unlock the door from the app.

The lock won’t open on its own when a Ring camera recognizes a face. Siminoff said deeper connections between the lock and the cameras haven’t been built, and Ring wants to take the time to get them right.

The lock has no camera of its own. “I think the lock should be a lock and should stay a lock,” he said.

He was also cautious about Amazon delivery drivers using the lock to leave packages inside. Garage delivery is a growing business for the company, he said, calling the garage “the airlock,” a semi-public space between the outside world and the fully private house.

“I still don’t see a world at scale where people are entering homes without the homeowner there,” he said. “It’s not a technology thing. It’s a human thing.”

Ring will expand to other types of locks and other countries if the deadbolt sells, Siminoff said, and tie the lock more closely to its doorbells. He said he’d take on other parts of the door, even the hinge, if he found a way to improve them.

“I never thought we’d do a lock,” he said. “I really didn’t.”

New cameras: Ring also announced five new cameras. Four add to its 4K lineup: the Outdoor Cam 4K Plus ($149.99), Spotlight Cam 4K Plus ($199.99), Floodlight Cam 4K Plus ($219.99) and Indoor Cam 4K ($99.99), the first indoor model in the line. The fifth, the $69.99 Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam 2K, rotates 360 degrees to follow motion.

The two indoor cameras go on sale Wednesday in the U.S., and the three outdoor models are available for preorder.

— Ravi Vedula, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, is leaving the company after 26 years. Vedula, who is based in the Seattle area, led an organization of more than 1,000 people that runs the data and analytics platform behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

“26 years. It’s time,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Goodbye and thank you, Microsoft. It’s been a privilege. I gave it my all.”

Vedula joined Microsoft in 2000 and was the first engineering manager for Exchange Online.

His memoir, “Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded,” was published in March by Microsoft’s 8080 Books. It recounts his childhood in a government housing colony in Hyderabad, India, with each chapter followed by a lesson about leadership, engineering or life, as GeekWire reported at the time.

“I leave with gratitude for the people and experiences that shaped those years,” Vedula told GeekWire.

He said he is leaving room for “another professional chapter if the right opportunity comes along,” but for now plans to focus on travel, ways to contribute and writing, including a possible book based on his experiences receiving a heart transplant in 2017.

— AI and robotics company Boston Dynamics announced Rohit Prasad as its new CEO, effective Oct. 7. Prasad, who is based in the Boston area, was Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for artificial general intelligence until he left the company at the end of 2025.

He takes over from interim CEO Amanda McMaster, the company’s chief financial officer, after Robert Playter retired in February following more than 30 years at Boston Dynamics. Hyundai Motor Group holds a controlling stake in the company.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, and oversaw the creation of its Nova AI models. Boston Dynamics makes the Spot and Stretch robots and is developing the Atlas humanoid. Prasad is also expected to join the company’s board, subject to approval.

“Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise,” Prasad said in the announcement.

— Qualtrics has appointed Mike Potter chief technology officer of the experience management company. He joins from Petal, an Ontario healthcare company, and has worked in leadership at Qlik, IBM and Cognos.

“I have spent the better part of my career building platforms at scale, the kind of work that requires deep technical conviction, strong collaboration, and a relentless focus on what customers actually need. That is what drew me to Qualtrics,” Potter said.

Qualtrics has dual headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah. It recently cut 117 jobs connected to its Seattle operations, largely affecting engineering and product teams. Last year, the company spent $6.75 billion to acquire Press Ganey Forsta.

— Shawn Stapleton has been named vice president and chief AI and innovation officer, a newly created role at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He joins the Seattle nonprofit from MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he led AI lifecycle management for more than three years. Before that, he was the Seattle-based head of data science for Philips.

Stapleton helped scale MD Anderson’s AI initiatives across clinical, research and administrative settings, Fred Hutch said, adding, “His experience at the intersection of strategy, governance and implementation will be instrumental as we continue building the foundation for AI-enabled medicine and discovery.”

— Seattle-based defense tech startup Overland AI has named Jon Abramovic as vice president of international growth. Abramovic has held sales leadership roles in Taiwan, Prague and Beijing. He was most recently director of global defense sales at SIG Sauer and spent eight years at Oshkosh Defense leading business development across Europe and Asia.

“Having spent years operating overseas, I’ve seen firsthand what our allies face against near-peer adversaries and what it takes to stay ahead. Overland AI’s technology represents a generational leap in the ground domain,” Abramovic said.

Overland AI is No. 7 in the GeekWire 200, a ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups.

— Noosphere Labs, a Seattle-area AI startup first covered by GeekWire in August, has announced its leadership team. The company, launched by former Meta AI research director Kevin Carlberg, is pursuing “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.

Its team includes:

• Tyler Simpson, co-founder and chief operating officer, who left Meta to start Noosphere Labs. He previously was co-founder and CTO of Luum by HealthEquity and spent more than 11 years at Microsoft.
• Andrew Ma, engineering leader, has more than 20 years’ experience across Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, most recently leading Google Cloud’s Apache Spark teams.
• Joshua Walton, founding design partner, was a director at Meta Reality Labs Research and worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens.
• Louis Barinaga, founding hardware partner, spent the bulk of his career at HP and more recently held leadership roles at Meta’s augmented reality program, Valve and Microsoft.
• Andrew Smith, founding AI engineer, led Zillow’s first agentic AI system and previously worked for Amazon and Sandia National Laboratories.
• Michael Iuzzolino, founding AI engineer, joined from Meta, where he worked on large language models, and previously held roles at Google Brain and Microsoft Research.
• Mikhail Shashkov, founding architect, was at Amazon Lab126 for more than seven years and previously at Sandia.

— Liz Pearce has been named Earth Finance‘s first chief commercial officer. She joined from Ever.green, where she was chief revenue officer. Past roles include CEO of LiquidPlanner, co-founder and CEO of Fresh Chalk, and vice president of marketing for GoDaddy.

Earth Finance, a Seattle-based startup helping businesses reduce their climate impacts, recently launched a platform called SpatiaFi that enables customers to make location-based capital decisions.

“Earth Finance is already delivering game-changing results for customers,” Pearce said. “I can’t wait to get to work with this team to scale that impact.”

— Charlie Bell, the longtime Amazon Web Services executive who left to run security, compliance and identity at Microsoft, has been appointed to the board of directors at the cybersecurity firm Tenable. The appointment was disclosed in an SEC filing and framed as “reinforcement for Tenable’s AI-driven exposure management push.”

— Two notable Amazon moves:

• Fırat Güder, a professor and chief engineer of Güder Research Group at Imperial College London, has joined Amazon as a scholar in the tech giant’s special projects organization. “Here, we are building the next generation of cutting-edge technologies that define the future of humanity. It is an incredible honor to join a small, elite group of innovators and researchers pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” Güder said.
• Leonardo de Moura has been promoted to vice president and distinguished scientist with AWS in Seattle. He joined the company in 2023.

— Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) has named Amelia Marckworth director of programs, innovation and entrepreneurship. She joins from Seattle University, where she has held leadership roles for more than a decade and also served as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the Albers School of Business and Economics.

“Amelia has a proven track record of launching and growing startup programs, coaching founders directly, and being part of WTIA as a committee member and mentor. We’re excited to bring that experience and talent onto our startups team,” Randa Minkarah, WTIA’s executive director and CEO, said in a statement.

— Hernan Alvarez has taken a role at Seattle-based Hyperparam to lead product and go-to-market at the startup, which is building tools for collecting, storing and analyzing the data that AI systems produce. The company recently launched a product called HypAware to improve oversight of AI agents and catch their errors.

Alvarez joins from Great Expectations, where he was CEO. He earlier worked with Hyperparam founder Kenny Daniel at Algorithmia, a machine learning company co-founded by Daniel and acquired by DataRobot.

— Philip Jensen has joined Zap Energy as vice president of fuel programs and operations. Zap, an Everett, Wash.-based fusion startup, announced in April that it was expanding its focus to include nuclear fission. Jensen was previously at First American Nuclear and spent more than seven years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Zap said Jensen “brings deep expertise in nuclear fuel design, testing, and manufacturing, and a track record of launching new fuel programs and partnerships.”

— Christie Johansen-Pinney has joined Noble Studios as its Seattle-based vice president of client experience. She has held VP roles at firms including Rooster Punk, DEPT and The Marketing Practice.

— Anders Mortensen, formerly CRO at The Trade Desk, has been appointed to the advisory board of Scowtt, a Seattle startup helping advertisers optimize their ad spending. Mortensen spent more than 13 years at Google, leaving as vice president of U.S. mid-market sales lead generation.

A longtime Microsoft engineering leader who was previously a Copilot chief technology officer is joining Amazon Web Services to work on its competing AI tools for coding and workplace productivity.

Pedram Rezaei, a nearly 20-year Microsoft veteran who was most recently a corporate vice president on the Microsoft Superintelligence team, starts Monday as a distinguished engineer in the AWS Agentic AI and Emerging Technologies organization, led by Swami Sivasubramanian.

Rezaei will work initially on Kiro, the AWS coding tool, and Quick, Amazon’s AI assistant for workplace tasks, Sivasubramanian wrote in a memo to his team Monday. “He is a hands-on engineer who is still in the code every day, and he plans to keep it that way here,” he added.

Kiro’s user count doubled from the first quarter to the second, and monthly AI users for Quick grew fourfold, according to the memo. Rezaei’s plan for his first few months is to “meet people, learn how things work here, and ship something real,” Sivasubramanian wrote.

Sivasubramanian’s organization was expanded in July to include emerging technologies, part of a broader reshuffling of Amazon’s AI teams.

The hire comes as Amazon and Microsoft compete more directly in AI tools for work. Microsoft last month unveiled an all-in-one Copilot app that combines chat, coding and agents, its answer to OpenAI and Anthropic. Amazon made its Quick desktop app generally available in September and brought its main features to mobile.

Rezaei joined Microsoft in 2006 and held senior technical roles on Power BI, Dynamics 365, Cortana, Bing and Azure Maps before moving to Copilot, according to his LinkedIn profile. He became Copilot’s CTO in February and moved to the Microsoft Superintelligence team in June, according to the profile. Sivasubramanian’s memo said Rezaei was most recently working on training foundation models.

We’ve contacted Microsoft for comment on his departure.

Rezaei is the latest Microsoft executive to move to AWS this year. Shawn Bice returned to AWS in May from a security role at Microsoft to lead its Automated Reasoning Group.

In his memo Monday, Sivasubramanian also told his team that two longtime AWS engineers, Marvin Theimer and Reto Kramer, have returned to work on neurosymbolic AI and automated reasoning, which he called “one of our biggest bets for the future.” Both came back from Microsoft, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Neurosymbolic AI pairs large language models with rule-based systems that can check whether an AI agent is following a company’s policies and procedures.

Speaking at Madrona’s IA40 Summit in Seattle last week, Sivasubramanian said nearly every CIO and CEO raises the same question about AI agents. “How do I know it is always going to obey all my rules and regulations?” he said. “This is a real concern.”

Solving that problem “actually unlocks so many use cases for all these enterprises,” he added.

Theimer, an AWS distinguished engineer for nine years before leaving in 2022, joined Microsoft in July 2024 as a corporate vice president and technical architect and stayed until March. It was his second stint at the company, where he worked from 1998 to 2006. He rejoined AWS in July as a vice president and distinguished engineer.

Kramer, who led an automated reasoning team at AWS before leaving in 2023, joined Microsoft in September 2025 as vice president of Security Platform & AI and stayed until May. He rejoined AWS in September as vice president of applied science.

Sivasubramanian hinted at more hires to come, writing that Rezaei joins “as we continue to build out our technical leadership team to help take on the ambitious work we have planned.”

Amazon says it will spend more than $1 billion over five years in the U.S. communities where it builds and operates data centers, responding to a growing backlash across the country against the tech industry’s massive AI infrastructure buildout.

The company’s new program, which it calls “Built Together,” will fund free community college, job training, energy upgrades for homes and schools, and other local projects identified by data center communities. It comes on top of more than $1 billion that Amazon says it has given to communities over the past three years.

Amazon also says it will stop using NDAs with government agencies on data center projects, install lower-emission backup generators at new sites, publish its energy and water use each year, and pay enough for power to keep local electricity bills from rising.

Announcing the commitments in a post Friday morning, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said local opposition to data centers — which he asserted is stoked by “misinformation and outright lies” — threatens the country’s position in the global race for AI leadership.

“Right now there are over 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country,” Garman wrote. “If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations.”

The business stakes: Amazon is making an unprecedented bet on AI, projecting about $220 billion in capital expenses this year, largely on data centers and chips. That’s more than the cash its business generates on an annual basis.

By comparison, the additional $1 billion in community funding over five years works out to about $200 million a year, or about one-tenth of 1% of this year’s projected capital spending.

Amazon’s AI strategy depends on finding communities willing to host its data centers. Microsoft, Google and other tech giants are spending on a similar scale, to meet current and anticipated AI demand, and they face the same problem.

Local opposition has become a real limit on the AI buildout. At least 75 data center projects worth about $130 billion were blocked or delayed in the first three months of the year alone, according to Data Center Watch, a group that tracks these disputes. An Economist/YouGov poll in late August found that 63% of Americans would oppose a data center in their community.

Pushing back on the narrative: Much of Garman’s post is a point-by-point rebuttal of what he calls myths about data centers.

He called it “false” that data centers are sucking up all the water in communities, “misleading and convenient scapegoating” to blame them for driving up all electricity rates, “untrue” that their backup generators emit huge amounts of pollution, and “false” that communities get nothing in return.

Amazon’s average data center uses less than 13,000 gallons of water a day, he wrote, and backup generators sit idle 99.9% of the time. Where electricity rates are rising, he attributed it primarily to an aging grid.

Garman pointed to “widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the U.S. about data centers to trick us into slowing down.” OpenAI and X have each reported China-linked accounts posting about data centers.

However, PolitiFact reported last month that the role of foreign influence in the opposition to data centers has been exaggerated, with little sign the accounts reached a wide audience.

“We understand why there is apprehension in some communities where data centers are being built,” Garman wrote. At the same time, he said Amazon and other data center operators have already taken many steps to address those concerns.

The new commitments, he wrote, are a way to codify the company’s existing practices.

Where Amazon and Microsoft differ: Microsoft promised in January not to seek local tax breaks for its data centers. Asked by GeekWire whether it would do the same, Amazon did not make that commitment. The company said it is the largest taxpayer in almost every community where it operates, and that local governments offer incentives to attract its projects.

In his post, Garman pointed to St. Joseph County, Ind., where he wrote that Amazon is expected to pay more than $3 billion in taxes on land that would have generated $1.2 million under its prior use. In Madison County, Miss., he cited more than 2,300 construction workers now on the job and more than 1,700 operations jobs to come.

In 2023, Good Jobs First, a watchdog group that tracks corporate subsidies, reported that five Amazon data centers in Morrow County, Ore., would receive about $1 billion in property tax breaks over 15 years, which the group called the largest known subsidy in the company’s history at the time.

Microsoft also went further on NDAs, saying in March that it would terminate its existing nondisclosure agreements with local governments. Amazon said its change applies going forward, and that it doesn’t plan to revisit past agreements, most of which no longer apply once a project becomes public.

Power costs: Amazon was among seven companies that signed a White House pledge in March to pay for the power and grid upgrades their data centers require.

The new commitment repeats that pledge, which the company said reflects what it was already doing. Amazon has long structured its power agreements to cover the full cost of serving its data centers, it said, with rates approved by state utility regulators.

In his post, Garman disputed that data centers are to blame for rising electricity rates. Among states with large numbers of data centers, he wrote, rates have risen in some, including Illinois and New York, and fallen in others, including Indiana and Mississippi. He wrote that new grid capacity, funded by the private sector, should lead to flat or lower rates for nearby residents.

However, according to U.S. government data reported by CNBC, residential electricity prices in three states with high concentrations of data centers were up sharply in August 2025 from a year earlier: 13% in Virginia, 16% in Illinois and 12% in Ohio, compared with 6% nationally.

Climate goals: Amazon’s carbon emissions rose 16% last year as the company expanded its data center capacity. Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, said at Climate Week NYC last week that the company remains committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2040.

Garman wrote that Amazon has been the largest corporate buyer of carbon-free energy since 2019. Under the new commitment, the company each year will publish the share of its energy that comes from carbon-free sources.

On water, Amazon says it is committed to returning more water to communities than its data centers use by 2030, and was 75% of the way to that goal as of 2025. Microsoft made a similar pledge in January.

Where the money goes: Amazon’s Built Together program is organized around three areas: education and job training, energy and water, and flexible funding for local priorities.

Addressing questions from GeekWire, Amazon didn’t provide a full breakdown of the $1 billion, but said it expects to put more than $100 million up front into community college endowments and roughly another $100 million into expanding its training centers.

Under the program, Amazon says it will:

• Cover out-of-pocket community college costs for an estimated 300,000 students in data center communities over five years. The company says agreements with 26 colleges are already in the works.
• Build 16 more training centers on or near data center sites, offering free certification programs in skilled trades. Amazon operates three of the centers now and has six more in development.
• Fund energy-efficiency upgrades at more than 300 schools and community buildings and more than 30,000 homes.
• Provide annual funding through local nonprofits and community foundations for projects such as roads, parks and fire equipment, with priorities set by each community.

“Every community is different,” Garman wrote. “What matters most in rural Oregon is not the same as what matters in suburban Virginia or a mid-size city in Ohio.”

The local funding will reflect those differences, he wrote, saying that Amazon is not deciding what communities need but rather “providing resources and letting communities decide.”

GeekWire reporter Lisa Stiffler contributed to this story.