Google is offering a fresh round of buyouts to some employees and cracking down on remote workers as it shifts more resources toward the artificial intelligence race, the company confirmed on Wednesday.
The Big Tech giant, led by CEO Sundar Pichai, ordered remote workers on some teams to spend at least three days in the office per week. The mandate applies to remote workers who live within 50 miles of an office.
“A number of teams are also asking remote employees who live near an office to return to a hybrid work schedule in order to bring folks more together in-person,” Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said in a statement.
The return-to-office push for remote workers is not a companywide policy and was being implemented on a team-by-team basis according to specific needs, the spokesperson added.
The company also offered voluntary buyouts to members of the division that oversees its search engine, as well as those on its core engineering team, and in marketing, research and communications units.
The budget-tightening effort comes after Google extended the same offer to members of its platforms and devices division in February. US workers on the teams are eligible to apply regardless of their level and will receive severance if they take the buyout.
“Earlier this year, some of our teams introduced a voluntary exit program with severance for US-based Googlers, and several more are now offering the program to support our important work ahead,” Mencini said in a statement.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many of Google’s employees have received the offer. The company had more than 183,000 employees as of the end of last year.
The company’s stock was flat in Wednesday trading.
CNBC had earlier reported on the policies.
Google and other tech giants have been trimming and restructuring their workforces while pouring tens of billions of dollars into developing advanced AI.
Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi said last October that the company would be looking for “additional opportunities” for slashing costs.
Google also faces some looming regulatory risks after losing a pair of major antitrust cases brought by the DOJ.
A federal judge will decide by August whether to break up Google’s search engine business, while another judge has set a September trial date to decide on how to handle the company’s illegal monopolies in the digital advertising sector.
In both cases, Google has vowed to appeal.
Google previously laid off about 12,000 employees in 2023 and several thousand additional employees across multiple teams throughout last year.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
