GEEK News
June 05, 2015 - 01:04 PM
Microsoft says its data centers use 90% less water than its earliest facilities as public concern grows
Aerial view of Microsoft data center campus in Wisconsin. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft announced Wednesday that over the past two decades, it has become dramatically more efficient in its use of water to cool data centers, slashing its consumption rate by 90% compared to levels when it opened its first facilities in the early 2000s. The company used 0.27 liters per kilowatt-hour last year,...
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Moment of ‘Zen’: Another billionaire’s superyacht turns heads in Seattle
The superyacht Zen arrives in the Ballard Locks in Seattle on Tuesday evening. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) It’s 100 feet shorter and $100 million cheaper than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superyacht, but another billionaire’s ship had no trouble drawing attention in Seattle on Tuesday. “Zen,” a $200 million, 289-foot yacht reportedly owned by Chinese billionaire Wu Guangming, motored...
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Seattle-area young entrepreneurs capture third-straight win in global TiE startup pitch contest
Team DuggAI, from left: Ashish Naik, Shaurya Duggal and Kruthik Ankam, hoist the championship trophy at the 2026 TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) Global Pitch Competition in Bellevue, Wash. (TYE Photo) A team of Seattle-area high school students won the 2026 TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TYE) Global Pitch Competition earlier this month, notching a three-peat for the TYE Seattle chapter. More than...
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Lime rides World Cup fever in Seattle to single-day trip record during USA vs. Australia match
Seattle Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch, center, rides a Lime Glider in downtown Seattle during the march to the match ahead of the USA vs. Australia FIFA World Cup contest on Friday, June 19. (Seattle Department of Transportation Photo) Lime went full Beastmode for last Friday’s FIFA World Cup match in Seattle. Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch was among the riders who helped Lime set a new...
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Microsoft’s next big thing for the cloud: an agent that keeps its cool when everything falls apart
Brendan Burns, Microsoft technical fellow and a co-founder of Kubernetes. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft is promising relief to engineers who get woken up at 3 a.m. for outages and other cloud glitches: an agent informed by its years of experience running Azure, designed to diagnose whatever’s going wrong and recommend potential fixes. One big benefit over humans: the agent can operate...
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Tech Moves: Microsoft names exec; Remitly CPO/CTO departs; AWS veteran to head Synthesia in Seattle
Mike Jackson. (LinkedIn Photo) — Mike Jackson has been promoted to chief digital safety officer at Microsoft, a role within the company’s Trusted Technology Group that includes oversight of children’s safety, tech responsibility and international regulatory work. In a LinkedIn post, he called the work “critical, urgent, and inspiring.” Jackson has been with Microsoft since 2020 and...
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This 3-foot-tall robot wants to be your kid’s classroom buddy and your mom’s new friend
A prototype of Codey, a humanoid social robot developed by Seattle-area startup Mind Children Robotics. (Mind Children Photos) At a recent robotics event in New York, a young girl hid behind her mother when she first saw Codey. The robot broke the ice by complimenting the girl’s shirt, and 45 minutes later she was still there, taking Codey through the entire plot of Frozen. Leaders of Mind...
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Surprise: Valve’s new Steam Machine is here, but the price is the real shocker
The Steam Machine 2026: a full gaming PC in a six-inch black cube. (Valve Software press image) Valve Software abruptly opened reservations for its latest Steam Machine on Monday, but due to the ongoing PC component shortage, did so at a significantly higher price than expected. The company, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., first announced the new version of the Steam Machine late last...
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Building a ‘digital twin’ 10,000 feet underground: PNNL, Nvidia and Fervo team up on geothermal AI
Fervo Energy’s Cape Station geothermal energy plant in Utah should start producing power this year. (Fervo Photo) The idea is so simple: generating power from the heat trapped beneath the Earth’s crust. It’s clean, renewable and potentially abundant. The challenge is how to map what lies beneath — and efficiently tap it. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is partnering with chipmaker...
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Amazon MGM Studios drops film about Sam Altman months after tech giant’s $50B OpenAI deal
Sam Altman at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco in 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon’s latest film drama isn’t a movie that it’s producing or streaming, but rather the situation surrounding a project it has dropped. Amazon MGM Studios has backed away from “Artificial,” a nearly finished film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The studio said last week that the film would “be better...
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Riding the clean energy waves: How Sila’s Gene Berdichevsky built a next-gen battery powerhouse
Sila CEO and co-founder Gene Berdichevsky, left, and Chris Dougher, Sila’s VP of operations, at the startup’s Moses Lake facility. (Sila Photo) Sila raised its first round of funding in September 2011 — the same month solar power manufacturer Solyndra went bankrupt, sullying the sustainability sector. But the California-based startup developing high-performance battery materials kept...
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Etzioni on AI: What the World Cup tells us about the best roles for humans and machines
Pregame ceremonies in Seattle on June 19, 2026, before the U.S.-Australia World Cup Group D match. (GeekWire Photo / John Cook) In soccer, a single blown offside call can decide who advances and who goes home. But what can you do? Referees are only human. Well, the 2026 World Cup has put computer vision and AI on the officiating crew: video review, a sensor inside the ball, semi-automated...
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Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 14, 2026
Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 14, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire A new Downtown Seattle Association report says the city’s JumpStart payroll tax has helped...
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Anthropic, Amazon, and the Fable shutdown; AI-powered school arrives; World Cup tech
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Anthropic takes its most powerful models offline after a U.S. order, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly contributing to the concerns that helped trigger it. We talk about what it was like to use one of those models, Claude Fable, while it was available, and dig into the Amazon-Anthropic dynamic. Then we explain how agentic AI is upending Amazon’s...
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Worlds collide at Amazon Spheres as pro-Palestinian group protests cloud giant’s Israel contracts
Protesters outside the Spheres on Amazon’s Seattle campus Thursday evening. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Carrying bullhorns and signs depicting Amazon executives as war criminals, about two dozen people protested outside the Amazon Spheres in Seattle on Thursday evening, calling on the company to stop providing technology to Israel for what they described as genocide in Gaza. The...
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Amazon employees file civil rights complaint over company probe into data center testimony
GeekWire File Photo An employee group filed a civil rights complaint against Amazon with the City of Seattle on Thursday on behalf of three engineers who allege that the company is wrongly investigating them for testifying before the Seattle City Council in favor of regulating data centers. The complaint, filed by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), invokes an unusual Seattle law...
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No billboard needed: This Seattle startup scored World Cup airtime with a scrappy cardboard sign
A Yoodli.ai cardboard sign is visible at right during Fox’s FIFA World Cup broadcast on Thursday from Seattle, featuring, from left, Rob Stone, Stu Holden, Clint Dempsey, and Alexi Lalas. (Screen grab via Fox Sports) When a startup town turns into a soccer town attracting worldwide attention, it’s a great opportunity to test your guerrilla marketing skills. Seattle’s Yoodli leaned into that...
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This startup wants to move kidney care out of the fax-machine era
Apacendo Health co-founders Chong Sun, left, and Jonathan Lin. (Apacendo Health Photo) Each year, more than 130,000 people reach kidney failure. It’s the most advanced and expensive stage of a disease that affects 37 million Americans, 90% of whom don’t know they have it. The tools being used to manage those patients, in many cases, haven’t kept pace. At nephrology clinics across the...
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Tech Moves: Seattle tech exec Brian Hall joins Mistral; Amazon departures; new Dropzone AI leader
Brian Hall (LinkedIn Photo) — Former Microsoft, Amazon and Google exec Brian Hall is now chief marketing officer for Mistral — and he’s bullish on the move. “I think this could be the most interesting marketing job in the world,” Hall said on LinkedIn. Mistral is a Paris-based enterprise AI platform that in 2024 signed a multi-year partnership giving it access to Microsoft’s data centers;...
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Seattle’s AI2 Incubator rebrands as AI House, and adds key investor as managing director
The managing directors of Seattle’s AI House, from left: Yifan Zhang, Jacob Colker, and Sri Chandrasekar. (AI House Photo) AI2 Incubator has spent the past 12 years building AI companies in Seattle. Now it’s taking the name of the community it built around that work, rebranding today as AI House and dropping the AI2 name it had kept as a vestige of its former ties to the Allen Institute for...
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Gradial raises $65M as startup sees rapid growth around agentic tools for enterprise marketing
Gradial co-founders, from left: Anish Chadalavada, Deip Kumar, Doug Tallmadge, and Anup Chamrajnagar. (Gradial Photo) Seattle startup Gradial continued its hot funding streak, raising another $65 million for its agentic AI platform that automates enterprise marketing. The Series C round was led by Insight Partners alongside existing investors VMG, Madrona, and PruVen Capital. Gradial...
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Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis exits Microsoft to launch stealth startup aiming to reinvent AI supply chain
Dan Lewis, co-founder and former CEO of Convoy, is launching a stealth AI startup after leaving Microsoft. (GeekWire File Photo) Dan Lewis, co-founder and former CEO of the online freight marketplace Convoy, has left Microsoft to start a new company focused on one of the most expensive problems in artificial intelligence: the cost of running AI models. The stealth startup is building “the...
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Devplan raises $2.5M to take on the product coordination work that AI coding is leaving behind
Devplan co-founders Chris Bee, CEO, left, and Anton Safonov, CTO. (Devplan Photo) Devplan, a Seattle startup trying to automate away the meetings and status reports that eat up a product team’s week, is coming out of stealth Thursday with $2.5 million in seed funding. The company, founded by two industry veterans with experience at companies such as Uber, Amazon, Snap and Meta, is also...
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Loss of another Seattle-area billionaire? Valve’s Gabe Newell is reported buyer of Florida estate
Is video-game industry leader Gabe Newell getting ready to vacate the Seattle area for sunny South Florida like some of his billionaire contemporaries? Reports of a luxury property purchase raise the question. According to The Wall Street Journal, Newell, CEO and co-founder of Valve Corp., is the buyer of a $70.8 million waterfront estate in Manalapan, Fla., north of Miami. The newspaper...
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Seattle biotech heavy-hitters emerge from stealth with $46M for next-gen migraine treatments
Vedana’s lealdership team, from left: Dr. Rob Lenz, board chair; Leon Garcia, co-founder and chief scientific officer; Anurag Agarwal, co-founder and CEO; and Dr. Ernesto Aycardi, chief medical officer. (Vedana Photo) Vedana Therapeutics, a Seattle-based startup aiming to prevent migraine attacks, emerged from stealth Wednesday with $46 million and a leadership team of heavy-hitters in...
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Amazon unveils new AI agents, trying to thread the needle between autonomy and human control
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of agentic AI, shows the Amazon Quick knowledge graph at the AWS Summit in New York. (Screenshot via live stream) Amazon Web Services is announcing a new set of AI agents for businesses, developers, and individual users, capable of everything from fixing security vulnerabilities to triaging email. The agents, unveiled at the AWS Summit in New York, reflect an...
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Selling sunshine from Seattle: Solius raises $23M to launch new at-home light-therapy device
The Solius Pro hangs on a wall, scans a user’s skin and directs appropriate UVB light therapy. (Solius Photo) A Seattle-area startup that once asked people to step inside a glowing kiosk for light therapy is now bringing that same technology into the home. Bainbridge Island, Wash.-based Solius Labs announced $23 million in Series A funding on Wednesday along with the launch of the Solius...
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Not just for coders: UW’s upcoming AI minor will reach beyond the computer science school
Magda Balazinska, director of the UW Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, at an event last year. (GeekWire Photo) As students, teachers and employers wrestle with the demands of an increasingly AI-powered world, the University of Washington has a new proposition: an interdisciplinary AI minor, with an anthropologist and a computer scientist at the helm. Set for launch in Spring...
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Why startup vet Robbie Cape chose insurance — a tough VC, a trillion-dollar market and the money
Robbie Cape, then CEO of virtual primary care startup 98point6, accepts the award for Health Innovation of the Year at the GeekWire Awards in 2019. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Robbie Cape has been hinting for months that something was coming. Now he’s ready to say what it is. The Seattle tech entrepreneur revealed on Tuesday that he’s building a new startup to reimagine the...
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Egypt and Belgium tied, but drones grab a World Cup win over Seattle with lighted scoreboard
The flags of Belgium, left, and Egypt are represented in the night sky near the Space Needle in Seattle after the teams tied 1-1 in a FIFA World Cup match on Monday. (Roman Yuferev Photo) Egypt and Belgium played to a 1-1 draw in a FIFA World Cup matchup in Seattle on Monday. Fans who looked to the sky near Seattle Center later that night got a visual win. Visit Seattle calls the lighted...
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Next-gen nuclear company TerraPower plants flag in UK
TerraPower’s lab tests the equipment and processes for next-generation nuclear reactors. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) TerraPower, the Bellevue, Wash.-based nuclear energy company, announced Tuesday the opening of a subsidiary office in the United Kingdom as it pursues its first international power plant. “TerraPower is entering the UK market with a long-term commitment to supporting...
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SpaceX leapfrogs Amazon and briefly tops Microsoft in market value on Cursor acquisition news
Elon Musk celebrates the SpaceX IPO last week. (Nasdaq Photo) Shares of SpaceX surged Tuesday morning, pushing the Elon Musk-led company above Amazon and into a neck-and-neck race with Microsoft for the title of the world’s fourth-most valuable public company, less than a week after its blockbuster $75 billion IPO. The rocket maker, satellite internet provider, defense contractor, and AI...
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Helion secures world’s first regulatory licenses for fusion power plant being built in Washington
An aerial view of Orion, Helion Energy’s planned fusion plant being built in Malaga, Wash. (Helion Photo) Helion Energy announced Tuesday that it’s the first company in the world to receive regulatory licenses for a fusion power facility. The Everett, Wash.-based startup broke ground last year on the planned plant in Central Washington. The Washington Department of Health (DOH) issued the...
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Two pizzas and a prototype: How agentic AI is rewiring Amazon’s teams and upending its traditions
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of agentic AI, on stage at AWS re:Invent in December. (Amazon Photo / Noah Berger) [Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the adoption and impact of AI and agents. See coverage of our related event.] Amazon is legendary for its process of “working backwards.” Start with a customer...
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Startup led by Microsoft veterans debuts the first real-time carbon tracker for AI workloads
Neuralwatt’s co-founders: CEO Chad Gibson, left, and Scott Chamberlin, chief technology officer. (LinkedIn Photos) Neuralwatt, a Seattle-based startup launched by two Microsoft veterans, has released what appears to be the first tool for calculating, in real time, the carbon emissions of individual AI requests — everything from asking a bot to edit a high school essay to deploying an...
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