Microsoft is offering voluntary severance packages to approximately 60,000 employees, opening the program to roughly a quarter of its workforce while excluding data center, sales, cybersecurity and quantum computing teams. The offer comes as the company maintains broadly flat staffing levels and directs substantial spending toward artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The program applies to eligible employees in the United States, Canada, India and the United Kingdom at vice president level or below. Xbox, Windows, Copilot and Finance are fully included. Eligibility does not mean those employees will leave: the number of departures will depend on participation in the voluntary offer.

The Decoder reported the program’s scope and details of an internal memo from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, who described the packages as a way to adjust staffing to changing business requirements. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company wants employees committed to addressing its most difficult problems. The available details do not specify the financial terms of the packages or how many employees Microsoft expects to accept them.

The exclusions show that the offer is not being applied uniformly across Microsoft’s businesses. Data centers provide the computing capacity needed to train and run AI models, making their operation central to the company’s infrastructure expansion. Cybersecurity and quantum computing are also excluded, alongside sales. Meanwhile, Copilot—the brand used for Microsoft’s AI assistants—is included, meaning that protection from the program does not extend to every team working on AI products.

This is Microsoft’s second voluntary severance initiative in 2026. In May, the company offered buyouts to 8,750 employees in the United States. It subsequently cut 4,800 jobs in July. The latest offer is therefore part of a sequence of staffing changes, although a voluntary program differs from a compulsory reduction because eligible employees choose whether to participate.

Microsoft’s workforce remains at about 223,000 people, roughly its level in 2022, despite strong revenue growth over that period. That comparison provides context for the latest offer: expanding revenue has not been accompanied by a similar increase in overall headcount. It does not, however, establish how staffing has changed within individual products, technical specialties or geographic markets.

At the same time, Microsoft continues to commit large sums to the physical systems supporting AI. Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood has said the company plans to spend approximately $170 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, slightly below its original $175 billion plan. Such infrastructure encompasses a different category of investment from staffing, including the computing systems and facilities required to support AI workloads.

The latest severance program leaves those infrastructure priorities protected while making employees in several major software and corporate operations eligible to depart. The eventual scale of the workforce reduction remains unknown; the approximately 60,000 figure describes the pool receiving the offer, not a confirmed total of job losses.

Sources: The Decoder