Breaking: Microsoft Cuts 9,000 Jobs in Latest Layoffs

Microsoft has confirmed another sweeping round of job cuts, with up to 9,100 roles—about 4 % of its global workforce—set to disappear in early July. The layoffs arrive barely six weeks after the company eliminated roughly 6,000 positions and follow a Bloomberg-flagged warning that “thousands” more would be trimmed once the fiscal year closed. Taken together, 2025’s three waves push Microsoft’s year-to-date reduction well past 15,000 employees.

People close to Microsoft’s budgeting process say the cuts are a straight swap: fewer salaries, more silicon. CFO Amy Hood told investors in April that capital spending would surge to about $80 billion this fiscal year, most of it earmarked for AI-ready data-centre build-outs and GPU purchases. The new round frees an estimated $1.7 billion in annual operating expense that management can funnel into those projects. Simply put, AI is taking jobs sadly. Put this in perspective, just before the May layoffs, CEO Satya Nadella said 30 percent of code was now written by AI and that number is expected to keep growing.

Internal memos point to mixed-reality hardware, Windows teams tied to non-AI features, and overlapping roles inherited from Activision Blizzard. But the heaviest blow falls on worldwide sales and marketing, where legacy quotas for Office renewals are being rewritten to push AI-infused Azure and Copilot subscriptions. Xbox and other gaming units are also bracing for staff reductions, mirroring earlier May cuts.

Microsoft has already deployed more than 600,000 Nvidia H100-class GPUs, and its home-grown Maia accelerator is headed for a second-generation tape-out later this year. Company insiders say at least $4 billion from the savings will fund a new GPU “gigacluster” in Iowa and a nuclear-powered data-centre project in Finland that will run real-time Copilot inference. Any division without an “AI story,” one program manager said after receiving notice, “found itself on the shortlist.”

Microsoft says affected employees will receive at least 60 days’ pay, six months of health-care coverage, and job-transition services. Hiring is frozen company-wide except for “critical AI and cloud infrastructure” roles. The message, though, is unmistakable: in the era of generative intelligence, every dollar—and every engineer—must serve Copilot, even if that means thousands no longer serve Microsoft at all.