Silicon Valley tech giant Google laid off hundreds of employees across multiple divisions as the company looks to curb expenses and shift its investment priorities with a focus on artificial intelligence.
The Mountain View, California-based company confirmed the cuts to its core engineering department as well as several other areas. It's a decision that extends a recent streak of layoffs and joins other major tech businesses that are shrinking their corporate workforces after bulking up to seize demand that emerged early in the pandemic.
The company, one of the largest office occupants in the San Francisco Bay Area, has put millions of square feet up for sublease over the past couple of years and has walked back numerous real estate investments.
It's adjusting to slowing advertising revenue, higher interest rates and a strengthened focus on expanding its stake in the burgeoning AI sector.
“We’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” a Google spokesman said in a statement to CoStar News. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”
The Alphabet Inc. subsidiary, which employed more than 182,300 people as of Sept. 30, said the latest round of layoffs was part of a reorganization effort.
Major Staffing Shift
The company early last year cut about 6% of its workforce, or 12,000 positions, in a move that marked the largest layoff round in the company's decades-long history.
Google's decision to eliminate the positions is the latest in a string of ongoing layoff announcements among corporate tech heavyweights such as Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Amazon told employees this week that it cut “several hundred” jobs across its streaming and theatrical film operations.
The company is looking "to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact," Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, said in a letter to employees.
The layoffs are an about-face for tech companies that hired aggressively throughout the pandemic.
Alphabet, for example, employed as many as 190,711 workers before the layoffs last year, in addition to tens of thousands of contractors. Its workforce included about 150,000 positions in 2021.