MicrosoftOct 31, 2026 11:21 UTCMicrosoft Offers Voluntary Severance to One-Quarter of Its Workforce
Microsoft is offering a voluntary severance package to approximately 60,000 employees, or about one-quarter of its total workforce, in 2025. This is the company's second such program this year, with AI-related teams excluded from the offer. While Microsoft's employee count has remained flat at approximately 223,000 since 2022, the company plans to invest around $170 billion in AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.
Microsoft has revealed that it is offering a voluntary severance package to approximately 60,000 employees, representing roughly one-quarter of its total workforce. This is the company's second voluntary severance program in 2025, and its scale has drawn significant attention.
Microsoft's employee count has remained flat at approximately 223,000 since 2022. However, the company plans to invest approximately $170 billion in AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, making clear a contrasting stance of restraining hiring while concentrating investment in this area.
This voluntary severance is not a forced layoff but a program employees choose to enter of their own accord. That said, teams involved in AI-related work are excluded from the offer, suggesting an intention to downsize the overall organization while concentrating talent in the AI division.
This move is occurring within a broader context of major technology companies fundamentally shifting toward "AI-first" organizational structures. Since late 2022, many companies have begun revisiting the workforce they expanded during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Microsoft is no exception. However, this initiative can be viewed as a strategy combining expanded AI investment with selective workforce realignment, rather than mere cost-cutting.
This workforce reduction, implemented alongside massive AI infrastructure investment, serves as an indicator of how seriously Microsoft takes its AI business. Rather than maintaining employee headcount while simply increasing investment, the company is reshaping its existing organizational structure to concentrate resources in the AI division.
Key points to watch going forward include how the slack created by voluntary severance will be directed toward AI division recruitment and development, and whether other major technology companies will pursue similar strategies. The challenge of balancing AI investment with workforce optimization is becoming a common industry-wide theme.
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