Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees as AI leads to efficiency push

JUST IN: Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, about 27% of its workforce, as its costly AI build-out drives an efficiency push.

Microsoft just offered buyouts to 60,000 people. That's 27 percent of the entire company.

The offer went out Monday to staff in the US, Canada, India and the UK, level 70 and below, which reaches all the way up to vice presidents. Take the package by early December, you're out the door on New Year's Eve. And here's why. Microsoft is spending over 50 billion dollars in a single quarter on data centres, up from 35 billion a year ago, to feed AI demand from OpenAI, Anthropic and everyone else.

So the machines get the money and the humans get an exit offer. Their HR chief calls it helping employees shape their next chapter, which is a lovely way to describe trimming headcount to pay for GPUs.

No target number this time, Microsoft says. But after April's retirement program and July's layoffs, this is the third squeeze this year. Earnings land Wednesday, and I'd bet the word efficiency comes up a lot.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.