Weekend Recap: Starbucks cuts 224 more Seattle jobs; Nvidia backs space data-center startup

It was another rough week for tech jobs in the region: Four Seattle-area employers disclosed cuts in five days.

• Starbucks is cutting 224 more jobs at its Seattle HQ, including tech roles. This completes a restructuring announced earlier this year. About 120 are employees who declined a move to Nashville. It brings Starbucks to 537 corporate job cuts in Seattle this year.
• Qualtrics laid off employees worldwide, including in Seattle, absorbing its $6.75 billion Press Ganey Forsta purchase. It’s not saying how many.
• TikTok cut 75 jobs in Bellevue, nearly all in e-commerce roles.
• Expedia Group parted ways with eight executives as it reorganized product and technology around AI.

Is Highspot next? The Seattle sales tech company completed its merger with San Diego-based Seismic, ending its independent run. Seismic is keeping the Seattle office, but says it’s evaluating the combined 1,700-person company for areas of overlap.

On the flip side: Elsewhere, we saw new money and more jobs.

• Nvidia joined a $250 million round in Redmond’s Starcloud, which is building AI data centers in space, at a $2.3 billion valuation — double where it stood in March.
• Portal Space Systems is preparing to ship Starburst-1, its first full spacecraft, from Bothell to Florida for an October launch.
• Zeno Power reserved a spot on a Firefly lander for a heater built to keep spacecraft components alive through the 14-day lunar night.
• GeekWire toured Anduril’s Bellevue outpost, where the defense company employs 560 people locally and sees a path to 1,000 engineers. (One exception: Anduril has exited the Foss shipyard in Seattle after the Navy canceled an autonomous vessel program.)
• Retail returns startup BuyWander moved its HQ from Spokane to the Seattle area, saying it has grown to 325 employees.
• Amazon’s drone delivery service is expanding to nearly 500 cities and towns by year’s end, nearly 13 years after Jeff Bezos unveiled the idea.

We discuss the Amazon drones on a new episode of the GeekWire Podcast, along with the week’s big talker: a 404 Media reporter hid an AirTag in a rare book and followed it to a secret Amazon site where old books are cut apart and scanned.

• Read more and listen here, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Seattle’s ‘Third Act’: A year after GeekWire asked where the region’s superstar AI startups were, Ascend’s Nate Bek and Plug and Play’s Ben Eisinger offer an answer in a guest opinion piece: they’re here, building rockets, geothermal plants and autonomous off-road vehicles rather than software.

• CBRE kept the region at No. 2 in its annual tech talent ranking, with 41,591 AI workers — alongside the highest office vacancy rate of the 50 markets ranked and a shrinking population of 20-somethings.

• Adaptive Biotechnologies co-founder Harlan Robins raised $15 million for Harell Data, a Bellevue startup paying research groups a cut of the revenue when AI teams train on their scientific data.
• Seattle could become the first city in the nation to ban grocery prices set from shoppers’ data, with a full council vote due in September.
• The King County Library System opened the continent’s largest book sorter in Renton, routing scanned items into one of 186 chutes.
• A Microsoft veteran who spent 32 years dreading the twice-yearly time change launched a campaign to end it in Washington, with a 2028 ballot initiative as the backup.

• Boeing’s 17,000 engineers and technical workers rejected a four-year contract offer and cleared the way for a strike in October. Members objected to a 3% cap on inflation-based raises, in a region where inflation ran 4.5%. (CNBC)
• Kalshi is fighting the order to halt most of its Washington operations, arguing the state is letting competitor Nadex keep running. A hearing is set for Sept. 2. (Seattle Times)
• Harvard Business School is selling a $699 boot camp taught partly by AI clones of its instructors. (The New York Times)
• Hundreds of Lime riders are expected downtown Saturday night for the third “Lime takeover” of the summer. Lime says it isn’t affiliated; SPD’s message is “please, please, please wear a helmet.” (KUOW)

Tech and startup community gatherings on our radar in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

• Aug. 24: TechCon 365, PWRCON & DATACON Seattle 2026
• Aug. 25: Pitch Please #10
• Aug. 26: AI Tinkerers Seattle: GTM Engineering Track — August
• Aug. 27: Seattle Tech Mixer 2026
• Aug. 28: Seattle Black Nerd Festival 2026 presented by LANGSTON
• Aug. 29: Seattle AI Film Festival
• Aug. 29: Electric Aircraft Expo

Check out the GeekWire Calendar for more.

Thanks for subscribing, have a great weekend, and look out for those scooters downtown tonight. — GeekWire editor Todd Bishop, [email protected], and publisher John Cook, [email protected].