Hiring Market: Cuts and Hires

Tech workers are getting laid off and ghosted in the same market where some artificial intelligence infrastructure companies are still posting hundreds of openings. (layoffs.fyi) U.S.-based tech employers announced 52,050 job cuts in the first quarter of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, and 18,720 of those cuts were announced in March alone. (businessinsider.com) Layoffs have hit companies including Meta, Amazon, and Oracle this year, while TechCrunch reported on March 25 that Meta was cutting several hundred employees across sales, recruiting, and Reality Labs. (businessinsider.com, techcrunch.com) At the same time, Nebius listed 342 open roles on its careers site this week, spanning sales, data center operations, cloud engineering, legal, and recruiting across the United States, Europe, Israel, and Asia. (careers.nebius.com) Nebius has been expanding alongside the artificial intelligence computing boom. Bloomberg reported on March 11 that Nvidia agreed to invest $2 billion in the company, and on March 16 that Meta committed to spend as much as $27 billion over five years on Nebius infrastructure. (bloomberg.com, bloomberg.com) For job seekers, the slowdown is showing up as silence as much as pink slips. Business Insider reported that Gen X applicants said employers repeatedly stopped responding after interviews, while one laid-off communications worker said she had been ghosted by dozens of employers. (businessinsider.com, businessinsider.com) Business Insider described the pattern on April 14 as a “job seeker recession,” with hiring slowing enough that many applicants are struggling to find work even without the broad-based unemployment spikes seen in past downturns. (businessinsider.com) The split reflects where companies are still spending. Challenger told Business Insider that employers are shifting budgets toward artificial intelligence investments, while Nebius says its infrastructure teams build and operate the data centers and GPU clusters behind AI cloud services. (businessinsider.com, nebius.com) That leaves a labor market with cuts in broad corporate functions and hiring concentrated in a narrower set of AI build-out roles. On one side are severance emails and unanswered applications; on the other are hundreds of openings tied to the race to add chips, power, and data center capacity. (businessinsider.com, careers.nebius.com, layoffs.fyi)