Note: Former Microsoft and AWS exec Harini Gokul serves on the Medina (Wash.) City Council.

Guest Opinion: Saturday, Aug. 15, was India’s 80th Independence Day. I marked it at the Indian Consulate in Seattle, at a celebration hosted by Consul General Prakash Gupta. The Indian American diaspora attended in full force, from community members to tech CEOs.

The event was open to the public, and the line to get in stretched over a block, a powerful, visible display of India’s economic success and soft power, right here in the Pacific Northwest.

But the more interesting story is not the celebration itself. It is who showed up to celebrate, and why.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson issued a statewide proclamation declaring Aug. 15 “India Day.” The mayors of Seattle, Bellevue, Kent, and SeaTac each signed their own municipal declarations, joined by the King County Council, which represents 39 cities across the region. U.S. Reps. Suzan DelBene and Marilyn Strickland sent official messages marking the occasion.

In person, state Sen. Tina Orwall was joined by the mayors of Redmond and Kent, alongside council members from cities including Redmond, Bothell, DuPont, and Medina.

What’s driving this goodwill?  There are now 5.2 million Indian Americans in the U.S., about 1.6% of the population, according to the latest Census Bureau figures.

In King County alone, more than 100,000 residents are of Indian origin; statewide, the figure is roughly 200,000. In cities like Redmond and Kent, the Indian American community makes up a meaningful share of the tax base, the school population, and the local business community.

This is one of the reasons elected officials are showing up. Because their Indian American communities are central to their growth story, a constituency whose economic and civic weight has become too significant to ignore.

This momentum has been building in the region for decades. What has changed is the altitude. The same talent pool that once filled engineering organizations is now filling CEO offices, board seats, and, in smaller but growing numbers, elected office.

Business success is turning into civic and cultural presence. Many of our Indian American leaders started in tech. Satya Nadella has run Microsoft since 2014. Anand Eswaran has led Veeam since 2021. Srini Gopalan became CEO of T-Mobile in November 2025.

And increasingly, this leadership is branching out. You see the impact in venture capital, through investors like the late S. “Soma” Somasegar, who moved from Microsoft to Madrona; and in culture, through the Seattle Orcas cricket franchise, launched in 2023 by an investor group including Soma, Satya, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Samir Bodas, and Ashok Krishnamurthi to grow the sport nationally.

With the change in demographics, civic influence is increasing as well. Redmond, Kent, and Bothell all elected Indian-origin council members in the most recent cycle. I represent the trend myself, now serving in my second term as a city council member for Medina, Wash.

My story is an all too familiar one. I came to the U.S. as an engineer two decades ago and grew up alongside this region’s hyperscalers, first at Microsoft, then Amazon. Today I sit on corporate boards and work across private equity and venture, and I have the honor to represent the city I live in. I am one small example of how we are scaling our impact and giving back to our adopted home.

Eighty years after India’s independence, the story of its diaspora in our state has moved well past individual success stories. It’s measurable now, at scale, in the leadership of some of the most important companies in the state, and in its growing influence across culture, economics, and politics.

This is why everyone from the governor’s office to city halls across Washington has decided this partnership is worth investing in and worth showing up for.

Washington state has assembled the country’s deepest bench of quantum technology assets — including two major cloud platforms, a national lab and the first U.S. quantum computer factory — but has captured almost none of the federal money now driving the industry.

That disconnect is the focus of a report released Tuesday morning by the Washington Technology Industry Association, the Northwest Quantum Nexus and the state Department of Commerce.

Since a January 2023 assessment, Washington state’s quantum ecosystem “has grown denser, more visible, and physically larger,” reads the report, authored by Nirav S. Desai, CEO of innovation consultancy Moonbeam Exchange. “Yet the state has fallen behind peers on the coordinated public investment that converts assets into a resilient cluster.”

The report makes five recommendations:

• Use the governor’s office to convene a standing group — universities, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, companies, investors and the Commerce Department — that decides which federal grants to pursue and assembles joint bids for funding.
• Pick one to three specialties to compete in, such as post-quantum cryptography or industry applications, rather than chasing all of quantum.
• Build the workforce at all three levels: developers first, then the missing undergraduate and technician programs.
• Position the Seattle region and Washington state as a landing pad for Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese quantum companies.
• Create a single point of contact for founders, and promote the quantum machine access the state already has but hasn’t advertised.

“This isn’t a resource problem; it’s a coordination problem, and that’s the good news,” said Nick Ellingson, WTIA’s vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship, in a news release.

Quantum computers, which have yet to be proven commercially viable, can hold multiple states at once and could eventually solve problems beyond the reach of conventional machines.

The report points to efforts by states including Illinois, Maryland and Colorado, which have committed $500 million, roughly $200 million and $127 million respectively to quantum campuses and research hubs.

In Washington state, Microsoft and Amazon are among the major tech companies leveraging their research to build quantum platforms and technology. Maryland-based IonQ’s Bothell, Wash., plant, the country’s first dedicated quantum computer factory, employs about 100 people, part of an expansion the report says could generate 1,200 to 2,000 jobs within five years.

Gov. Bob Ferguson vetoed $100,000 for a state quantum strategy in May 2025, citing fiscal pressure, while directing the Commerce Department to build industry partnerships and produce policy recommendations. Tuesday’s report was funded by a grant administered by Commerce.

In April, Ferguson steered $500,000 from the state’s Strategic Reserve Fund to IonQ’s Bothell expansion, Washington’s first direct investment in quantum.

Illinois, by comparison, has committed more than $500 million to the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, a campus near Chicago anchored by PsiQuantum and IBM.

Read the full report here.