- Another wave of layoffs is sweeping across tech.
- Many are continuing to hire amid the cuts, sometimes even growing head count overall in the coming year.
- BI rounded up some recent examples, including those with plans to grow staffing in AI, infrastructure, or the cloud.
Just because you’ve read about a tech company doing layoffs doesn’t mean the company isn’t continuing to hire.
The first two months of the year have already seen many tech firms conduct or announce layoffs. While some may be looking to operate more efficiently, many have hundreds or thousands of open job listings.
Backfilling the roles of laid-off employees or hiring more staff in divisions deemed a higher priority could build back head count levels in the coming year.
In some cases, companies plan to grow their head count in the coming year, and one red-hot area many companies are bolstering hiring is AI, for example, and related divisions such as infrastructure and cloud computing.
Here’s a look at some tech companies that are still adding staff to their payroll amid layoffs.
Workday
The workplace management platform is laying off 1,750 employees, or 8.5% of its workforce.
CEO Carl Eschenbach told staffers in a memo he published that the company would “continue to hire in key strategic areas and locations” throughout fiscal year 2026. Workday is “prioritizing innovation investments like AI and platform development, and rigorously evaluating the ROI of others across the board,” he wrote.
Workday has 348 job openings on its website as of this writing.
Meta
Meta is cutting 5% of its workforce, targeting employees it says are low performers, with plans to backfill those roles later this year. The company is planning to hire “in the priority areas of infrastructure, monetization, Reality Labs, generative artificial intelligence (AI), as well as regulation and compliance,” it said in its Q4 earnings last month.
Meta appears to be accelerating hiring for machine learning engineers amid its layoffs, according to an internal memo viewed by BI.
Meta has 1,750 job openings on its website as of this writing.
Stripe
Stripe has laid off 300 workers, primarily in product, engineering, and operations roles. The cuts represent roughly 3.5% of the payment platform’s workforce.
However, the company’s chief people officer, Rob McIntosh, said in a memo to staff that Stripe is “not slowing down hiring.” Stripe plans to boost its head count to roughly 10,000 employees by the end of 2025, which would be a 17% increase year-over-year, he wrote.
Stripe has several hundred job openings on its website as of this writing.
Salesforce
Salesforce is reportedly laying off 1,000 people, who will be able to apply for other positions internally, Bloomberg reported this month. The company has not publicly commented on the matter and did not immediately respond to BI’s request for comment.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in December that the company plans to hire 2,000 salespeople focused on selling its AI products.
Salesforce has 995 job openings on its website as of this writing.
Microsoft
Microsoft began performance-based layoffs at the end of January.
Separate from the performance-based layoffs, the tech giant also made cuts across organizations including security, experiences and devices, sales, and gaming, BI previously reported.
Microsoft has 2,128 job openings on its website as of this writing.
Other companies could hop on the layoffs train
Layoffs can result in a domino effect in the tech industry — look no further than Mark Zuckerberg’s famous “year of efficiency” or the CEOs inspired by Elon Musk’s deep cuts when taking over Twitter.
If that’s also the case this time around, we could see other Big Tech companies carry out their own layoffs.
At Amazon, for one, CEO Andy Jassy said last year that he wanted to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
Google recently offered voluntary exit packages to US staff in its Platforms and Devices unit. Anat Ashkenazi, the CFO of Google parent company Alphabet, said in October that the company would be looking for “additional opportunities” for cost cuts. Google simultaneously expects “some head count growth in 2025 in key investment areas such as AI and cloud.”
And while Amazon and Google haven’t laid out more explicit plans to ramp up hiring in AI, you can bet they’re going to duke it out with their Big Tech peers in the heated AI talent wars.
Big Tech firms have also made no secret of their ambitious spending plans when it comes to AI. Recent earnings from Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google indicate their combined capital expenditures are set to exceed $320 billion this year, driven largely by AI investments.
