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Google offers employees the opportunity to voluntarily leave the company in exchange for severance packages

Gabriel Dumitrache

4 November 2026, 14:08

International

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Google is offering employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland financial packages for voluntarily leaving the company, as part of a strategy to reduce costs and redirect resources toward the development of artificial intelligence. The information was published by Reuters.

The program targets certain departments and does not appear to include Google DeepMind and Google Cloud, divisions considered strategic, where the company continues to hire. The initiatives were introduced in some teams at the beginning of 2025 and expanded in June.

In Switzerland, where Google has approximately 5,000 employees, the offer provided for payment of one monthly salary for each year worked, capped at 12 salaries. Employees who accepted the proposal began leaving in August. It is unclear whether the same conditions apply in all five countries.

The reorganization is taking place amid growing investments in the infrastructure needed to develop AI. Microsoft is likewise carrying out voluntary departure and layoff programs, while allocating billions of dollars to data centers and cloud services.

Context: financial pressure due to AI investments and scrutiny of data center projects

Before the announcement about severance packages at Google, Microsoft launched a voluntary departure program for approximately 60,000 employees in the United States, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom, targeting staff across several divisions (including those related to AI and Copilot). The company continues, however, to invest heavily in data centers and artificial intelligence chips, as investors put pressure on the returns from this spending.

Meanwhile, Google’s AI infrastructure projects have been at the center of controversies in Finland: the Supervisory Agency called for preparatory work at the data centers in Muhos and Kajaani to be suspended no later than October 23, 2026, citing deforestation and land disturbance carried out before environmental obligations had been clarified. Subsequently, the Finnish police also opened a criminal investigation into possible environmental damage at the Muhos construction site.