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Microsoft offers voluntary severance packages to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, while keeping teams critical to its AI push out of the cuts.
Microsoft is offering voluntary severance packages to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce. It is the second such program the company has launched this year, and it comes as the software group spends heavily on artificial intelligence while holding its overall headcount steady.
According to the report, the company's headcount has stayed flat at around 223,000 since 2022. Over the same period, Microsoft has directed large sums into AI infrastructure, and it plans to spend about $170 billion on that effort in 2026 alone. The voluntary offer thus sits alongside a sharp increase in investment rather than a shrinking of ambitions in the technology.
The program is structured to protect teams that the company regards as central to its AI development. Employees in those areas are not part of the severance offer, which signals that the company is trying to separate the groups it considers essential to its future products from the wider workforce. Reductions of this kind, even when voluntary, tend to draw attention because they affect a large share of staff at once.
For employees, the choice to accept a package is individual, and the offer is framed as voluntary rather than as a layoff. The distinction matters for how workers and the public read the move, as it places the decision with staff rather than with management directly. Still, the scale of the offer, covering a quarter of the company, makes it one of the larger workforce adjustments in the technology sector this year.
The move also reflects a broader tension in the industry. Large technology companies are pouring capital into AI infrastructure, including data centres and computing capacity, while trying to manage the costs of their existing operations. Microsoft's approach of holding headcount flat while offering exits to a large share of staff shows how firms are balancing these demands. The company has not, according to the available reporting, tied the program to a specific cost target, and the reporting does not describe the financial terms of the packages in detail.
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