Microsoft said Monday that it’s offering buyouts to a wide swath of employees as it strives to balance a costly artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out with capital efficiency.
The software maker announced a new voluntary exit offer for certain workers in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom at its experience level of 70 or below.
Around 60,000 people are eligible, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named while discussing an internal matter. The effort affects about 27% of Microsoft’s total workforce of 223,000 people.
Microsoft has been ramping up spending on data centers to accommodate high AI computing demand, supplying cloud services to Anthropic, OpenAI and a slew of other companies. Capital expenditures for the September quarter should exceed $50 billion, Microsoft said in July. In the same quarter a year ago, capital spending and finance leases came to $34.9 billion.
That’s put a strain on Microsoft’s finances. In April, it announced a first-ever voluntary retirement program that around 7% of U.S. employees were eligible for. Then, in July, Microsoft announced plans to lay off 4,800 employees.
“The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we’re evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter,” Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer, wrote in a memo to employees. “This builds on what we learned earlier this year through the Voluntary Retirement Program.”
