Elon Musk’s xAI is establishing its Seattle-area engineering center in a former Epic Games space in downtown Bellevue, Wash., following through on Musk’s announcement in September that the company planned to open an outpost in the region.
The location was first reported Monday by the Puget Sound Business Journal, and confirmed by GeekWire based on references to xAI in online permit logs. The nearly 25,000-square-foot space is on the 8th floor of the Lincoln Square South building at 10400 NE 4th St.
The lease makes xAI the latest AI company to set up shop in Bellevue, following the news last week that OpenAI is expanding to nearly 300,000 square feet at nearby City Center Plaza.
In fact, the xAI and OpenAI offices in downtown Bellevue will be about a 10-minute walk from each other, should Musk and Sam Altman ever find themselves in their respective Seattle-area hubs at the same time and decide to patch things up.
Founded in 2023, xAI is best known for Grok, its AI chatbot, which is integrated into Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
News of the company’s Seattle-area location comes days after SpaceX announced its acquisition of xAI in a deal valuing the AI company at $250 billion, further consolidating Musk’s businesses. The key tenant-improvement filing for the Bellevue space was in late December, indicating that the lease was in the works before the acquisition closed.
Job listings show xAI is hiring for a range of engineering roles in the Seattle area, with salaries from $180,000 to $440,000. The positions go beyond networking and infrastructure to include core AI research roles, such as members of the technical staff focused on CUDA/GPU kernel development, image generation, video generation, and world models. This signals that the Bellevue office will serve as a hub for AI model development, not just operations support.
SpaceX already has a large presence in the Seattle region, focused on the development of Starlink satellite internet service out of the company’s Redmond engineering offices.
We’ve contacted xAI for more information about its plans for the office.
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