Inside Anduril’s AI warfighting tech buildup in the Seattle area

A rare glimpse inside Anduril: GeekWire toured the defense giant’s Bellevue outpost, getting an up-close look at its AI-powered augmented reality glasses, drones, and edge computing devices for the U.S. military. Anduril employs 560 people in Bellevue and downtown Seattle, up from about 30 four years ago, and SVP Tom Keane says it could reach 1,000 engineers here — recruiting from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta to get there.

• One exception to the growth: We’ve learned that Anduril has pulled out of the Foss shipyard on the Ship Canal after the Navy canceled the program behind it.

Nvidia invests in Starcloud: The chipmaker joined a $250 million round as a new investor in the Redmond startup, which is building AI data centers in space. The deal values Starcloud at $2.3 billion, double where it stood in March. Starcloud flew an Nvidia H100 to orbit last November and trained an AI model there, and its next satellites will run on chips Nvidia is designing for space.

Seattle as a beacon for tech talent: The region held onto the No. 2 spot in CBRE’s annual tech talent scorecard, behind only the Bay Area, with 41,591 AI workers and the second-highest tech wages in North America. The report also flagged Seattle’s office vacancy rate — the highest of the 50 markets ranked — and a population of 20-somethings that shrank between 2019 and 2024, which raises concerns about the pipeline of talent for the future.

Tech Moves: A 14-year Amazon and AWS veteran heads to Oracle, Seattle Children’s names a Stanford informaticist as CIO, Zillow hires its first chief legal and policy officer, and more.

No more changing the clock? Scott Thurlow spent 32 years at Microsoft dreading the twice-yearly time change, and the “meeting chaos” it brought across time zones and countries. Weeks after retiring, he launched a campaign to end Washington’s clock changes without waiting for Congress, with a 2028 ballot initiative as the backup if lawmakers won’t act.

Haunted hard drive: Desktop Explorer is a mystery game played entirely on the desktop of an inherited 1990s PC, complete with a glitchy virtual assistant that seems to know more than it should. Thomas Wilde reviews the retro puzzle adventure from Seattle studio Recurring Dream, funded in part by Redmond-based Innersloth’s indie game fund.

Hot Links

• A group led by the family of venture capitalist Vinod Khosla cleared its last major hurdle to owning the Seahawks, as the NFL’s finance committee unanimously recommended approval of the record $9.6 billion sale and sent it to a vote of all 32 owners Wednesday in Atlanta. (Seattle Times)
• UW alum Jeff Dean gave his fullest account yet of Discovery Loop — the AI-for-science startup he left Google for after 27 years — telling a Stanford audience the goal is to run a research experiment in a minute or an hour instead of a day or a week, thousands at a time. (YouTube)
• Seattle startup Strike Graph (#163 on the GeekWire 200) launched Atlas, an agentic AI layer that continuously assesses a company’s compliance posture and prioritizes fixes, with human approval required before it acts. (BusinessWire)
• Researchers at Richland’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are working to recover the energy still left in used nuclear fuel — more than 90% of its original potential, by their estimate — with a newly funded DOE project adding AI tools to the effort. (PNNL)
• Microsoft’s Windows 365 Cloud PC service reached its fifth anniversary, with the company highlighting new capabilities aimed at giving AI agents their own managed virtual desktops to work from. (Microsoft)

Thanks for subscribing, and have a great weekend.  — GeekWire editor Todd Bishop, [email protected], and publisher John Cook, [email protected].