Google Quietly Extended Voluntary Buyouts to Staff in Five More Countries as AI Spending Soars
Google confirmed it offered voluntary exit packages in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland from June, as Alphabet tries to rein in costs; DeepMind and Google Cloud were left out.
Google has expanded its voluntary exit programme beyond the United States and Britain, offering severance packages to some employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland, Reuters reported on Wednesday. The company confirmed that the offers were made from June this year.
What Google said
In a statement, Google said some of its teams had introduced a voluntary exit programme with severance in 2025, and that in June it had expanded the programme to a few countries “to support our important work ahead”. Reuters said it could not establish how many employees had accepted.
The move is part of a wider effort by parent company Alphabet to keep costs in check while it spends heavily on artificial intelligence, a spending spree that has made investors nervous and weighed on its share price. Chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi has repeatedly named AI and cloud computing as the company’s main hiring priorities, and, as in earlier rounds, the AI lab DeepMind and Google Cloud appear to have been excluded.
The Swiss example
Switzerland, where Google employs about 5,000 people and runs a large engineering centre in Zurich, offers a glimpse of how the scheme works. According to people familiar with it, the packages were announced in mid-June, employees had until mid-July to decide, and those who accepted began leaving in August. They were offered one month’s salary for each year of service, capped at 12 months. In one team of around 50, at least four people took the offer.
Google laid off more than 200 people in Switzerland in 2023, a move that led to protests and a walkout by staff.
A wider trend
Google’s executives have described the buyouts as a way for employees who no longer feel in step with the company’s direction to leave on good terms, although at least one division that received offers was later also hit by layoffs. The report comes a week after Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 of its employees, underlining how Big Tech is trimming staff costs even as it pours money into AI infrastructure.
Featured image: Photo: Grendelkhan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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