University of Washington Moves GIX Graduate Program Into Microsoft's Campus Rent-Free

The program, an institute that offers a master of science degree in technology innovation, now occupies 48,500 square feet inside Microsoft's Building 92. Microsoft provided a $42 million in-kind donation to establish the embedded facility, and the university leases the space at no charge, GeekWire reported. Microsoft's headquarters sits across Lake Washington from the university's main campus.

GIX debuted in 2015 as a partnership between the University of Washington and China's Tsinghua University, and it drew $70 million in Microsoft support at its original location in Bellevue, known as the Steve Ballmer Building. That site has since been abandoned, and GeekWire reported indications that a long-term arrangement there did not come together as intended.

Microsoft President Brad Smith announced the opening in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. "Last night we opened a door unlike any other," Smith wrote. "At the heart of Microsoft's campus, step into the new home of the UW's Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) and you cross from Microsoft into the University of Washington. No one has ever put a great research university and a leading technology company under the same roof quite like this. As far as I know, no one has even tried."

Smith tied the arrangement to artificial intelligence. "Artificial intelligence is advancing fast," he wrote. "The question is whether the people building it understand the world it's changing. This calls for a new style of education and leadership." He said GIX students would learn from faculty across the university, take classes taught by Microsoft employees and be mentored by people from across the industry in the Pacific Northwest.

The Slashdot item carrying the GeekWire report compared Smith's description of a Microsoft-influenced education at GIX with his position on K-12 schooling. In an interview last month, Natasha Singer, author of Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, told NPR that Smith "has been one of the leaders in the tech industry pushing" for computer science and, more recently, AI literacy in schools.

Singer recounted Smith's argument that private-sector philanthropy is doing that work "because public schools have failed to do what they were supposed to do," and that industry involvement is "certainly better than nothing." She said she had told him over a decade of conversations that when large technology companies "put their finger on the scale, it tips education in certain ways that not only favor the tech industry but can obscure equally or more important things."

The GeekWire account said the Bellevue GIX location was abandoned and the new space is leased without rent, while Smith's post frames the move as a new model for pairing a research university with a technology company. Under the arrangement, Microsoft employees will teach courses inside a facility the company donated to establish, and the university will hold the lease on the space on Microsoft's campus.