Microsoft plans to offer buyouts to about 60,000 workers as part of the company’s efforts to trim costs and retool its workforce as it invests heavily in AI. That amounts to just over a quarter of its total staff.
Select personnel in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and India at the vice president level and below will be eligible for a Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO), Amy Coleman, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, said in a note to staff today. Microsoft had 223,000 employees as of the end of June, a number that was down from 228,000 at the end of 2025.
According to Bloomberg, the cuts come amid a focus on AI, with costly data centers supplying cloud services to the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI. In June, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed community backlash to the company’s massive AI data center buildout, which has sparked concern over power costs, environmental concerns, and the potential impact on jobs. He insisted one of Microsoft’s data centers’ daily water usage over the course of an entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use. Some staff at Microsoft, including those working on data centers, are excluded from the buyout offer.
According to CNBC, employees have until December to decide whether they will take the offer, and those who do will leave Microsoft on December 31.
The buyout offer comes just three months after Microsoft laid off 4,800 roles, or what was about 2.1% of its global workforce. The Xbox layoffs, which hit 1,600 staff in July as part of Asha Sharma’s “reset” of the gaming business, formed a part of those cuts. Earlier this month, an Xbox business strategist claimed that everyone in the video games industry was using AI while pretending not to.
And earlier this year, more than 30% of eligible employees chose to to take Microsoft’s first ever voluntary retirement program.
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