Software King of the World Microsoft is dangling voluntary redundancy for about seven per cent of its US voles while it splurges on AI.
The outfit told staff it will offer the option to long-serving voles whose years of service plus age total 70 or more. More than 8,000 workers qualify out of its 125,000-strong American workforce.
Microsoft chief people officer Amy Coleman told staff: “Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases, decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,”
She added the offer was meant to give them “the choice to take that next step… with generous company support.”
The scheme follows Vole’s binning of more than 15,000 jobs last year, as it lines up $140bn in capital expenditure in its fiscal year ending in June. It is the first time the 51-year-old tech giant has offered voluntary redundancies, and it declined to comment.
Other tech groups such as Amazon, Oracle and Meta have pushed through sweeping lay-offs since the start of last year, claiming they want to streamline. They have ramped up AI spending and shifted resources away from other bits of their businesses.
AI-linked job cuts are becoming a bigger force across the US labour market, fuelling worries about what the tech does to employment. Fintech group Block went so far as to axe “nearly half” of its workforce, arguing that AI could plug some of the gaps.
Vole shares are down roughly 14 per cent this year, lagging several peers as investors question whether it can actually monetise all that AI spend. The company is due to report quarterly earnings next week.
Microsoft is racing to expand data centre capacity for large customers, including Anthropic and OpenAI. Its software business is facing pressure from the same start-ups it is helping to feed.
Microsoft’s in-house model-building has struggled compared with Google’s, with no frontier model unveiled yet. It has leaned on OpenAI for the models behind its services while insisting it still needs its own.
Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman told the FT that his “superintelligence” team is pursuing “true self-sufficiency” at OpenAI. He said it will not have the data centre capacity for a frontier system until later this year, Suleyman said.
