On Tuesday I wrote about what it means that 147,000 technology workers in the Puget Sound are now in person more days than not. This week the other side of the story arrived: Amazon shedding another 251,000 square feet in Seattle, Microsoft pausing construction on five buildings in Redmond.
Both things are true at the same time. And understanding why is the subject of a five-essay series I am writing called The Repricing.
For thirty years, when technology companies grew, the region grew with them. More revenue meant more employees, more space, more tax revenue. That flywheel has broken. But what is replacing it is not a collapse. It is a repricing, and the early signs are more promising than most people realize.
AI companies are arriving in this region every month, hiring for frontier research roles and signing major leases. They are coming because three decades of technology investment left behind something no other region can replicate overnight: a concentration of deeply experienced engineers, product leaders, and technical managers who want to build what comes next. They are voting with their capital that this talent, in this place, working together in person, will produce something a distributed team cannot.
High-quality office inventory on the Eastside is approaching capacity with no significant development pipeline behind it. Seattle has the building stock, the infrastructure, and the scale to absorb what is coming. The competitive position is extraordinary. The question is whether the policy environment will unlock it or continue to stand in the way.
That is the argument at the center of this series. The first essay is linked in the comments. The next to publish will make the case that Seattle holds an advantage no other American city can match, and propose what needs to change to capitalize on it.
I wonder how Google got past ERCOT's poor management of the Texas power grid.