Happy Solstice. The week's storylines include Amazon facing protests on two fronts, SpaceX briefly topping Amazon in market value, Helion winning the first-ever fusion plant license, and a video game mogul eyeing a Florida mansion.
Amazon draws complaints from current and past employees: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators protested outside the Spheres in Seattle on Thursday (above) over its technology contracts with Israel, seeking to disrupt a gathering inside. Separately, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice filed a complaint with the city accusing Amazon of wrongly investigating three engineers who testified to the City Council in favor of regulating data centers. Amazon disagreed with both groups' accounts, and cited its policies on employee conduct.
Amazon vs. its own investment: CEO Andy Jassy reportedly told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other senior officials that Amazon researchers had used Anthropic's Fable 5 to obtain information that could aid cyberattacks, helping trigger a government order that forced the models offline. Anthropic pushed back, saying if the same standard were applied across the industry it would essentially halt all new model deployments. Read more.
🎙️This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we talk about the evolution of Amazon-Anthropic dynamic and explain what it was like to use Fable for the brief window it was available. Listen to the episode here, and subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
The tax debate reignited: Five years after Seattle's JumpStart payroll tax took effect, a new Downtown Seattle Association report says downtown has shed roughly 30,000 jobs and seen office values fall 48%, even as Bellevue grew. Mayor Katie Wilson says the tax helped the city survive the pandemic and argues no single policy deserves the blame. Read more.
To the moon, and then some: Less than a week after its $75 billion IPO, SpaceX briefly surged past Amazon and Microsoft in market value after announcing a $60 billion acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor. SpaceX also competes directly with Amazon's Project Kuiper satellite broadband business. Its Redmond engineering hub, where employees build Starlink technology, is now an outpost of one of the world's most valuable companies. Read more.
A first for fusion: The Everett, Wash.-based startup Helion Energy cleared a historic regulatory hurdle this week, becoming the first company anywhere to receive licenses for a fusion power facility. Washington's Department of Health issued the permits for Helion's Orion plant in Central Washington, where construction is already underway on a facility aimed at supplying power to Microsoft by 2028. Read more.
GabeN heads south? Valve co-founder Gabe Newell is the reported buyer of a $70.8 million waterfront estate in Manalapan, Fla., north of Miami — potentially joining Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz and Rich Barton in a growing exodus of Seattle-area billionaires. The move isn't confirmed, but one Bellevue developer was already tallying the wealth leaving the state: "This is going to leave a mark." Read more.
From freight to inference: Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis has left Microsoft to launch a stealth startup targeting one of AI's biggest cost problems, running models efficiently at scale. He's calling it "the supply chain for intelligence," a platform spanning data centers, networking, chips, and software to route AI requests in real time. Details including the company name and funding remain under wraps. Read more.
An AI education for everyone: The University of Washington is launching an interdisciplinary AI minor open to students in every major, co-led by computer scientist Magda Balazinska and anthropologist Ben Marwick. Set to debut in spring 2027, the program emphasizes ethics and critical thinking alongside technical skills — a deliberate contrast to the purely technical AI literacy that dominates most university efforts. Read more.
Guerrilla marketing, World Cup edition: When Fox Sports set up a live broadcast at Pier 62 for the FIFA World Cup, Seattle AI startup Yoodli saw an opportunity. Here's what they did.
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Thanks for subscribing, and have a great weekend. — GeekWire editor Todd Bishop, [email protected]; reporter Kurt Schlosser, [email protected]; and reporter Lisa Stiffler, [email protected].
