Hold on to your engineers, Amazon and Microsoft — Elon Musk’s AI startup is coming to town.
In a post this week on the billionaire’s X social media platform, xAI announced that it’s establishing a new engineering hub in Seattle. Job posts are already up for roles on its image and video generation teams, as well as GPU kernel engineers, with salaries ranging from $180,000 to $440,000 a year.
The expansion to the region is notable in part because of Musk’s complicated relationship with Microsoft, where he reportedly interned early in his career. Musk is suing Microsoft — along with its partner OpenAI — alleging the two have formed an anti-competitive AI monopoly.
At the same time, Microsoft is one of xAI’s key industry partners. Musk and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced in May that the Azure cloud would host xAI’s Grok models, giving the startup a better pipeline to the enterprise market.
Elon Musk launched xAI in 2023 as a direct competitor to OpenAI, with the mission of “understanding the true nature of the universe.” Based in Silicon Valley, it’s best known for Grok, a chatbot powered by real-time data from X, formerly Twitter.
The specific location, size and other details of the xAI office in Seattle haven’t yet been announced. We’ve contacted the company for details and will update this post when we hear back.
Due to the strong pool of engineering talent, Seattle has been a prime location for Silicon Valley engineering outposts dating back to the arrival of Oracle and Google two decades ago, although the trend has cooled somewhat since the pandemic.
Other major Silicon Valley AI startups with offices in the region include OpenAI, which this week announced a deal to acquire Bellevue, Wash.-based Statsig for $1.1 billion; and Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot and a close partner of Amazon, which also invests in the company.
Musk himself is no stranger to the region. His aerospace company, SpaceX, operates a major facility in nearby Redmond, which serves as the primary development hub for the Starlink satellite internet service.
Business Insider first reported the news of xAI’s new Seattle office.
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