Google’s parent company Alphabet is the next major tech company to undergo massive layoffs.
The search giant says it plans to eliminate roughly 12,000 jobs and reduce its staff by 6%, its largest round of layoffs in company history, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company said that the job cuts would span the entire company, but some segments, like recruiting and projects outside the company’s core businesses, will see greater layoffs.
In an email to employees, the CEO of Alphabet (and Google) said that to capitalize on the company’s early investments in artificial intelligence, the company must make tough choices. By eliminating these jobs, the company will realign its focus to better capture AI’s momentum.
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Google’s workforce ballooned to 187,000 through the pandemic, up from 119,000 employees in 2019.
“It’s clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead. There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have,” said Sundar Pichai.
The announcement is the latest round of significant layoffs in the tech sector. Microsoft recently announced it was laying off as many as 11,000 employees. Amazon is expected to cut over 18,000 employees, also the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history, according to CNBC.
Facebook’s parent company Meta announced it is cutting 10,000 employees. In case you had forgotten, since Elon Musk took over Twitter, his layoffs have generated significant headlines. Musk has reduced Twitter’s workforce by 50%, and the company expects more layoffs.
“The stage is being set: tech names across the board are cutting costs to preserve margins and get leaner,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said.