Big Tech’s AI spending spree is starting to show up in headcount decisions, and the latest company to trim its workforce voluntarily is Google.
Reuters has confirmed that Google began offering voluntary exit packages this year to employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland, expanding a buyout program that started in 2025 for some of its US and UK teams. A Google spokesperson said the company introduced a voluntary exit program with severance last year, and expanded it to more countries this June to support its priorities going forward.
The move comes just days after Microsoft offered buyouts to around 60,000 employees, more than a quarter of its global workforce, as it looks to fund its massive AI infrastructure bets while keeping costs in check. Between the two companies, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the AI boom isn’t just changing what engineers build — it’s changing how many engineers are needed to build it.
Switzerland Gets A Closer Look
Reuters’ reporting zooms in on Switzerland, where Google employs about 5,000 people out of a major engineering hub in Zurich. According to people familiar with the matter, the buyout program there covered multiple divisions, employees started leaving from August onward, and the packages amounted to one month’s salary for every year of service, capped at 12 months. In at least one team of about 50 people, four employees reportedly took the offer.
This isn’t the first time Google’s Zurich office has gone through workforce cuts — the company laid off more than 200 employees there in 2023, which led to a staff walkout at the time.
DeepMind And Cloud Stay Protected
A pattern running through all of Google’s buyout rounds so far is which teams get left out. Employees in Google Cloud and in DeepMind, the company’s AI research unit, have consistently been excluded from these voluntary exit offers, and the latest expansion appears to follow the same approach. Google’s CFO Anat Ashkenazi has repeatedly called out AI and cloud computing as the company’s top hiring priorities on earnings calls, so it’s not surprising the company is protecting those teams even while trimming elsewhere.
That protection makes sense given how central AI has become to how Google actually builds software now. CEO Sundar Pichai has said that nearly all the code at the company is now touched by AI — a dramatic jump from about 30 percent just a couple of years ago. As AI tools take over more of the grunt work of writing code, it stands to reason that Google wants to keep its AI talent intact even as it looks to shrink headcount elsewhere.
The Bigger Picture
Alphabet’s overall workforce has actually kept growing in recent quarters, but the company has been trying to reallocate its people toward the areas it considers priorities. That juggling act is happening against a backdrop of investor anxiety — Alphabet’s heavy AI capital spending has rattled Wall Street and weighed on its stock price in recent weeks, even as the company’s cloud business continues to post strong revenue growth.
Microsoft’s own buyout program, announced last week, covers employees across teams like Xbox, Windows and Copilot, while excluding parts of sales, marketing and its data center staff — largely the same “protect AI, trim elsewhere” logic Google appears to be following.
Whether voluntary exits are enough to manage costs, or whether they turn into the kind of outright layoffs Google has resorted to in the past for specific divisions, remains to be seen. But for now, both companies are betting that offering employees a way out is cheaper, and less disruptive, than cutting them loose outright.