The Washington Technology Industry Association kicked off the third annual Seattle AI Week on Monday with a reminder that AI affects everyone, from engineers and artists to “someone who learned about ChatGPT today,” as WTIA’s Nick Ellingson put it.

“All of us should be a part of that conversation,” he added.

A few people in the audience took that statement literally.

Members of Troublemakers, a Seattle climate activism group, interrupted the week’s opening panel on AI and economic growth several times before they were led out by security. Outside on Elliott Bay, others floated in kayaks with a banner: “Power for People, Not for Tech.”

“These are not your constituents — we are,” one protester told Beau Perschbacher, Gov. Bob Ferguson’s senior policy advisor, as he addressed the large crowd of tech and startup leaders at Seattle’s AI House. Perschbacher was on a panel with Joe Nguyen of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Mattie Zazueta of OpenAI, the event’s presenting sponsor.

The group’s main message, according to members who spoke with GeekWire: the rush to build data centers and roll out AI is putting the state’s communities, jobs and environment at risk, and Washington should be investing in green jobs and clean energy instead.

The protest comes amid a broader backlash against data centers in Washington state and across the country. The Seattle City Council voted unanimously in June to pause new large data centers in the city for a year, and Washington AI Resistance organized at least 19 protests around the state this month calling for a statewide moratorium.

The event also came the same day Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, as it spends tens of billions of dollars on data centers and AI infrastructure.

The backlash contrasts with a push from the business and tech community for Washington state and the Seattle region to do more to stay competitive in the AI era.

“Washington helped build the technology economy of the last generation. We have an extraordinary opportunity to lead the AI economy of the next,” said former Gov. Chris Gregoire, now CEO of the business group Challenge Seattle, in her opening remarks at the AI Week event.

Gregoire cited efforts to put AI to work on the region’s own problems, including an AI permitting pilot in Everett that she said could cut the median wait for an accessory dwelling unit permit from 252 days to 90. She highlighted the AI-driven protein design work of Nobel laureate David Baker of the University of Washington, with applications in areas including the environment, agriculture and health care.

She also warned that Washington is close to the bottom for its business climate, even though it ranks second in North America for tech talent, as other states court its companies and jobs.

On the panel, Perschbacher said Ferguson’s administration has been focused on data centers since taking office, setting up a work group early last year to study their impact. The group looked for a Washington community that had been harmed by a data center and couldn’t find one, he said.

He added that the state won’t permit data centers to run diesel generators around the clock, and that their water use turned out to be “not out of line with a typical industrial user.”

Electricity is a different story. Data centers “use a really significant amount of electricity,” he said, and with demand also rising from EVs and heat pumps, getting enough power “is a major challenge.”

Perschbacher addressed the protesters directly, saying Washington has some of the strictest environmental laws in the country and that the state’s data center work group reinforced those rules rather than weakening them. Bills on ratepayer protections and transparency for data centers are likely to come back in the next legislative session, he said.

The issue also came up in the event’s second panel, on AI policy. State Sen. Marko Liias, who sponsored a bill this year on high-risk uses of AI, said data centers that want to locate in Washington need to meet “stringent expectations,” including adding clean energy to the grid, recycling water and dropping nondisclosure agreements that keep communities in the dark. Washington’s goal “has never been to be the cheapest or easiest place,” he said.

“When energy becomes scarce, I do think we need to be clear that our communities deserve access to that energy before the data centers do,” Liias said.

Joe Braidwood, founder of AI governance startup Glacis, which works out of AI House, said on the same panel that it was the first event he’d attended there with a public protest. “I think that’s actually kind of promising that people care enough to want to come together and talk and disagree and figure this out,” he said.

Zazueta, OpenAI’s global head of community programs, said in the opening panel that the industry needs to do a better job showing people the benefits of AI. Many people “read about these scary headlines,” she said, but don’t see how the technology applies to their daily lives.

OpenAI runs AI literacy workshops and trains libraries and community groups to lead their own, she said. The company opened an expanded office in Bellevue in March, its largest engineering center outside San Francisco.

Speaking with GeekWire outside the event on Monday afternoon, one of the protesters who had interrupted the panel singled out that remark. She said it dismissed public concerns about AI as the product of bad headlines, and she objected to the idea of using community groups to win people over to the benefits of artificial intelligence.

“They want to infiltrate our communities,” she said.

The opening panel with Zazueta, Perschbacher and Nguyen was titled “The Abundance State: Washington’s Chance to Lead the AI Future.” The protester objected to that framing, saying the panelists’ idea of abundance came down to easing permits for data centers.

It wasn’t the first time the group has protested the tech industry’s energy use. In 2024, it blocked entrances at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters to protest the company’s plans to power data centers in Oregon with natural gas.

Inside the event on Monday, as the interruptions continued, Nguyen, a former state senator who now leads the Seattle chamber, had responded to the protesters directly. “If you want to have your own event, have your own event,” he told them.

After they were led out, Nguyen said he agreed with the protesters, calling their passion “very warranted.” Those concerns are one reason Washington created some of the most stringent energy policies in the country, he said, adding that everyone would be better off if data centers elsewhere were held to the same standards.

“I think we’re very unique in Washington state to be able to actually do this in a way that really is mindful of our values, of the environment, and also pushing for innovation as well,” he said.

At the same time, Nguyen said demand for AI and data centers is market-driven, and it isn’t fair to criticize data centers while using them every day.

“For anybody who’s upset with data centers, I hope that when you email me, don’t email me,” he said. “Print it off and walk it to my office.”

Update, Oct. 27: Protesters interrupted the opening session of WTIA’s Seattle AI Summit six times Tuesday morning, during an on-stage interview of OpenAI’s Vijaye Raji by GeekWire’s Todd Bishop. They objected to AI-related job losses, the climate impact of data centers, OpenAI’s ties to the Trump administration and the leadership of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Making the entrepreneurial leap is hard enough, let alone launching a company into orbit. Andy Lapsa gave up a well-paying job, spent his family’s nest egg and went 15 months before paying himself half his old salary to get Stoke Space off the ground.

He said Stoke chose Washington state for its world-class talent in software, aerospace and manufacturing, and for a virtuous cycle in which iconic global companies bring talent and suppliers to the region, and their alumni go on to start companies of their own.

But if Lapsa and co-founder Tom Feldman were starting the Kent, Wash.-based rocket company today, he told a Seattle audience Monday, he’s not sure they’d do it here.

Lapsa cited factors including a political climate that vilifies successful companies and their founders; a state that does less than others to court promising startups; Seattle’s public schools, which he described as a failed institution; and the push for a wealth tax on unrealized gains, which he said would put startups out of reach for anyone who isn’t already wealthy.

“What will it take to ensure the next Stoke builds here, too? If Stoke were starting today, I’ll be straight honest with you: I’m not sure we’d make the same decision,” he said.

Lapsa delivered the keynote at “Manufacturing the Future in the PNW: Space, Defense & Robotics,” a Seattle Space Week event hosted by Creative Destruction Lab-Seattle.

The speech, which he read from multiple sheets of printed paper, drew on his family’s story and at one point left him choked up. The crowd gave him a standing ovation at the end. The talk was the buzz of the afternoon and the Space Week kickoff at the Museum of Flight in the evening.

Echoes of Schultz: Lapsa’s remarks tracked closely with a July op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who singled out Stoke as a test for the state.

“We should all be watching Stoke Space,” Schultz wrote, to see whether it and other companies “decide that Washington is the best place for them to grow.”

Schultz, who moved to Miami earlier this year, came up in Lapsa’s speech, too. Lapsa cited him and Jeff Bezos as examples of successful founders the region has vilified, and he pointed to Boeing’s headquarters move and Amazon’s HQ2 as part of the same pattern.

Other states calling: Lapsa said South Carolina, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Idaho and Illinois had all emailed him in the past week or two trying to get Stoke to open up shop there.

“I’ve never received the same in Washington state,” he said.

To be clear, in questioning whether he would make the same decision today, Lapsa was speaking hypothetically about founders starting new companies, and didn’t suggest that Stoke plans to leave Washington, where the company has been expanding its operations.

Hours later, Lapsa was among the 23 members of Gov. Bob Ferguson’s new Washington Space Council, introduced at the Space Week kickoff event, as GeekWire reported. Speaking there, Lapsa struck a similar tone, stressing the need for the state to move quickly.

“States like Florida and Texas and Colorado want this industry, and they want it bad,” he said. “They compete for it every day. Washington has every advantage it needs to lead them all, and the window to use those advantages is open right now.”

A rocket ship: Lapsa’s comments carry additional weight because of Stoke’s trajectory.

Stoke is developing Nova, a rocket designed so that both of its stages can return and fly again, with the goal of making access to space cheaper and more frequent. It’s only the second company to pursue full reusability, after SpaceX, which reuses the first stage of its Falcon 9 but hasn’t yet achieved full reuse with its much larger Starship.

The company announced a roughly $1 billion Series E round this month, bringing its total funding to about $2.3 billion. It has more than 350 employees in Washington state, a 168,000-square-foot factory in Kent, and a test site in Moses Lake that it’s expanding from 75 to 550 acres.

The first Nova launch is scheduled for early 2027 from Cape Canaveral.

The personal stakes: Lapsa made his case against a wealth tax by telling a personal story that he said he had never told before.

His father grew up in a post-war refugee camp and waited 12 years to immigrate to the U.S., arriving without speaking English. He became a university researcher, but Lapsa’s mother still worked a minimum-wage job to help put Lapsa and his two siblings through college. Lapsa and his wife graduated from college about $200,000 in debt and spent about a decade paying it off.

When he left Blue Origin to start Stoke in 2019, he gave himself nine months to get on track to earn a living wage. Small-business grants and a few angel investors kept the company going.

That’s why proposals to tax unrealized gains worry him. When a startup raises money, its founders become wealthy on paper overnight, he said, without a dime of cash to pay the resulting tax bill.

“It makes it so that the only people who can afford to start a company are the people who are already rich,” he said.

Washington doesn’t tax unrealized gains. However, Lapsa noted that the idea of a wealth tax has been popularized in California and to some extent locally. A one-time tax on California billionaires’ net worth is on the November ballot there, and wealth-tax bills introduced in Olympia haven’t advanced.

Washington’s new 9.9% tax on income over $1 million, which takes effect in 2028 if it survives legal and ballot challenges, applies to income, not to the paper value of a founder’s shares.

A note of optimism: Lapsa closed by urging the audience to look past the headlines in their feeds and think critically about the consequences of the policies being proposed. He warned that political extremism harms the country and benefits its adversaries, and that both sides of the aisle are feeding a dangerous cycle of rhetoric.

Americans have more in common than their differences, he said. The freedoms they share, including the ability to change public policy when it isn’t working, are what made the U.S. the greatest country in history, he added.

“These are the reasons I stubbornly cling to the hope that Washington state will come around,” he concluded, “and the next Stoke Space decides here is their place.”

Updated at 3:56 p.m. to clarify that Washington does not tax unrealized gains, and to add context about wealth-tax proposals and the state’s new tax on high earners.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has created a public-private council to elevate the Evergreen State’s profile as regional clusters compete for primacy in America’s space industry.

The 23-member Washington Space Council was introduced tonight at the Museum of Flight during a kickoff event for Seattle Space Week, a celebration organized by Space Northwest.

“The council will help keep us competitive by comparing Washington with other leading states in the industry and identifying ways we can continue to improve and compete,” Ferguson said.

Washington state already ranks as one of the nation’s space industry hotspots. “We’re proud to have a cluster of more than 90 space companies employing more than 13,000 workers, generating over $4 billion in annual economic activity and $1.6 billion in annual payroll,” Ferguson said.

But Andy Lapsa, co-founder and CEO of Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space, told tonight’s crowd that several other regions are competing with the Pacific Northwest for space-related investments. “States like Florida and Texas and Colorado want this industry, and they want it bad,” he said. “They compete for it every day. Washington has every advantage it needs to lead them all, and the window to use those advantages is open right now.”

Boeing has historically been the state’s leading venture in aerospace, but when you focus on ventures that concentrate strictly on space, Blue Origin is high on the list. Seattle is particularly strong in the satellite sector: More than half of the world’s satellites are built in the Seattle area, thanks to SpaceX’s Starlink facilities in Redmond and Woodinville, plus Amazon Leo’s factory in Kirkland, BlackSky’s production plant in Tukwila and Xplore’s operation in Bellevue.

Gravitics, Interlune, Portal Space Systems, Starcloud and Starfish Space are among other space ventures represented on the Washington Space Council. The list also includes elected officials, union leaders, educators and investors, plus representatives from space-related tech companies and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Ferguson said the council will “identify barriers for the industry and find opportunities for growth.”

“That includes, by the way, workforce development, infrastructure and much more,” he said. “And the council will look for ways we might be able to develop Washington-based commercial launch capabilities. That would be a very exciting addition to what we’re doing right here in Washington.”

Ferguson brought a member of the audience, 10-year-old Sebastian Yu, to the stage when he signed the executive order that officially created the council. After the signing, the governor handed the pen to Yu.

“Your assignment, Sebastian, is that when we do that first launch, you have to save this pen and bring it with you to the first launch,” Ferguson said. “Take care of this pen, OK? I’m going to expect to see it again someday.”

Notes from the kickoff:

• Space Northwest presented three awards to recognize contributions to the region’s space industry. The Shooting Star award for municipal support went to the city of Kent, Wash. Portal Space Systems won the Rising Star award for emerging space companies, and SpaceX won the North Star Award for large space companies.
• Kent Mayor Dana Ralph noted that her city’s connection to the space industry goes back to Boeing’s work on the lunar rovers for NASA’s Apollo moon missions in the 1970s, while acknowledging that Kent can’t rest on its laurels. “Our job is to make it possible for companies to build and grow and hire. That means reinvesting in the basics: roads, great mobility, water, sewer, plentiful and easily accessible energy and industrial land,” she said.
• Mehran Mesbahi, professor and chair of the University of Washington’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, highlighted efforts to boost careers in the space industry. “We have Husky Satellite Lab, a group of energized students at UW, and we’re going to create a certificate program around space systems going forward,” he said.

Seattle Space Week continues on Tuesday with the Space Northwest Symposium at the Federal Way Performing Arts & Event Center.