Microsoft is to reduce its staffing by another 4 percent worldwide, or about 9,000 jobs, in its latest round of cuts as it makes huge investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The company, which had about 228,000 employees worldwide in June 2024, announced a previous round of layoffs in May that affected about 6,000 staff.

A Bloomberg report in June said Microsoft was planning to cut thousands of jobs with a focus on sales.

Job cuts

A separate Bloomberg report said the cuts would also affect about 10 percent of the jobs at Microsoft’s Barcelona-based King division, which makes the Candy Crush video game, involving a loss of about 200 staff.

However, the cuts are planned to affect a range of job roles at Microsoft.

The company said on Wednesday that it intended to reduce organisational layers and the number of managers and would generally streamline products, procedures and roles.

Microsoft is one of the world’s most profitable companies, with a market capitalisation of about $3.7 trillion (£2.7tn), but its heavy spending on AI has affected profit margins at its cloud division.

The company earlier said it expected to spend about $80bn on artificial intelligence infrastructure, such as data centres, in the fiscal year ended in June.

Microsoft did not directly attribute the cuts to its AI strategy, saying in a statement provided to Silicon UK only that it was positioning itself for success in a dynamic marketplace.

AI spending

The company often restructures in July at the beginning of its fiscal year, but it is unusual for it to make large rounds of job cuts so close together.

Microsoft competitors that are making large investments in AI infrastructure are also cutting staff.

Meta, Google and Amazon have all made significant job cuts in the past year, while spending tens of billions on AI.