The University of Washington and Microsoft today celebrated the opening of the permanent home of the UW’s Global Innovation Exchange (GIX), an institute supporting tech leaders, on the tech giant’s Redmond, Wash., campus.
GIX is the first UW program to set up full-time operations at Microsoft, whose headquarters are just across Lake Washington from the university’s main campus. The company provided a $42 million in-kind donation to establish the embedded facility.
The UW is leasing the new 48,500-square-foot GIX space in Microsoft’s Building 92 rent-free.
“At a time when AI is transforming how we learn and work, that proximity will create new opportunities for University of Washington students, Microsoft employees, and researchers to learn from one another and accelerate innovation,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement.
GIX’s mission is to provide interdisciplinary graduate and professional education to tech leaders. It enrolls more than 150 students each year in its Master of Science in Technology Innovation program, which offers in-person and hybrid online options.
“At GIX, we keep people — not technology — as our focus, recognizing that technological change is not an end unto itself. Its value depends on how people use it to create opportunity, strengthen institutions, and contribute to broader social progress,” said Sean Carr, executive director and CEO of GIX.
The institute opened in 2017 in Bellevue’s Spring District. From then until 2023, Microsoft provided $70 million in endowment support, facility improvements and lease payments. GIX moved to its new Redmond home in July. The space includes classrooms, labs, prototyping and makers space facilities, and a high-tech remote learning studio.
GIX was initially created as a collaboration between the UW and Beijing’s Tsinghua University to offer graduate technology degrees for American and Chinese students, with the Chinese research university establishing a physical presence in the U.S.
It appears the arrangement did not come together as planned. The GIX website notes that students can earn dual master’s degrees, one from the UW and the other from Tsinghua, but the links for Tsinghua are dated. Under its “global experiences” heading, the site lists a two-week immersion program last summer for students from National Taiwan University to study in Seattle.
The announcement of the new facility says GIX participants will have access to “scholars, researchers, technologists, and business professionals from around the world” who are onsite at Microsoft.
Other GIX partners include T-Mobile, Amazon, Meta, Aigen, Cisco, Mitsubishi, Responsible Innovation Labs, AI2, Vaisala, King County Metro, Sound Transit, and the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory and Urban Freight Lab.
The institute is a self-sustaining unit of the UW and does not receive operational funding from the university or the state. It operates in partnership with the UW’s College of Engineering and Foster School of Business.
The UW and Microsoft said in a release that the arrangement “demonstrates how a public research university can engage deeply with industry without sacrificing its academic independence or public purpose.”