Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to U.S. engineers

Microsoft offered one-time voluntary buyouts to eligible U.S. employees on April 23, part of a broader reshaping of its workforce as the company pours more money into artificial intelligence infrastructure. CNBC reported the offer was the first buyout program of that scale in Microsoft’s 51-year history and said the company opened it to certain U.S. workers at the senior director level and below. The April 23 memo, viewed by CNBC, said the program was meant to give eligible employees “the choice to take that next step on their own terms,” according to Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer. Bloomberg reported that about 7% of Microsoft’s U.S. workforce was eligible for the buyouts, citing a person familiar with the planning. (cnbc.com) Microsoft has not publicly confirmed the internal figures described in the user-provided context about completed buyouts or a new quarter-specific target for 9,000 additional cuts. What is public is that Microsoft carried out a separate round of about 9,000 layoffs on July 2, 2025, with Bloomberg reporting at the time that the cuts were aimed at controlling costs while the company ramped up AI spending. (cnbc.com) ### Which employees were eligible for the buyouts? CNBC reported that the buyout program applied to U.S. workers at the senior director level and below whose age plus years of service added up to at least 70. Employees on sales incentive plans were excluded, and eligible workers and their managers were due to receive details on May 7, CNBC said. (bloomberg.com) Microsoft had 228,000 employees as of June 2025, including 125,000 in the United States, CNBC reported. On that base, a 7% eligibility pool would amount to several thousand U.S. workers, though Microsoft did not publish an exact count in its investor materials. ### How does this connect to Microsoft’s AI spending? Microsoft said on April 29 that its AI business had surpassed a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, up 123% from a year earlier. (cnbc.com) In the same fiscal third-quarter earnings release, the company reported revenue of $82.9 billion, net income of $31.8 billion and 12% year-over-year growth at LinkedIn. CNBC reported that Microsoft has been ramping up capital spending on data centers to supply cloud customers with computing power for generative AI models. Bloomberg separately reported in July 2025 that Microsoft’s 9,000 layoffs were tied to cost control as AI spending increased. Business Insider reported on May 8 that an internal Microsoft document spelled out buyout terms and said the company was using the offers to cut costs amid infrastructure spending plans tied to AI. (microsoft.com) That report supports the broad connection between the buyouts and Microsoft’s capital allocation, but it does not independently verify the specific internal memo language in the user-provided context. (cnbc.com) ### What else changed in Microsoft’s pay system? CNBC reported that Microsoft also changed its annual rewards process at the same time, decoupling stock awards from cash bonuses and giving managers more flexibility to recognize high-performing employees. The company also simplified managers’ pay choices, reducing the number of options from nine to five, according to the memo viewed by CNBC. (businessinsider.com) Amy Coleman, who became Microsoft’s chief people officer in March 2025, has been leading the company’s human-resources organization during that overhaul. Microsoft said in March 2025 that Coleman would join the senior leadership team reporting to Chief Executive Satya Nadella. (cnbc.com) ### What can be verified from the internal-memo claims? Microsoft’s investor materials verify that LinkedIn revenue rose 12% year over year in the quarter ended March 31, 2026. Public reporting also verifies that Microsoft launched a broad U.S. buyout program in April and that the eligibility pool was about 7% of the U.S. workforce. The specific claims that roughly 7% of U.S. buyouts were already completed, that management signaled about 9,000 further cuts in the current quarter, and that an internal memo explicitly said payroll was shifting toward AI capital expenditures could not be independently verified from public, on-the-record sources reviewed here. (blogs.microsoft.com) Reuters did not appear in the search results with a matching report, and Microsoft has not published those details in an earnings release or blog post. (microsoft.com) Microsoft’s next regularly scheduled checkpoint for investors is its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report in late July 2026, when the company typically updates headcount, spending and segment growth. Its April 29 earnings materials remain the latest official public filing cited here on LinkedIn growth and AI revenue. (microsoft.com)