Microsoft executives announced Tuesday that they are offering voluntary severance packages to roughly a quarter of their workforce, citing the urgent need to redirect human payroll funds toward Nvidia chips and liquid cooling systems. The tech giant confirmed that each departing staff member will free up enough capital to continuously train a large language model for an additional twelve seconds.
The buyout initiative, which extends to a staggering 60,000 workers across the company’s global offices, is part of a broader internal strategy to gradually phase out carbon-based employees. While management cautioned that they do not expect a majority of the eligible workforce to sign on, they stressed that any voluntarily surrendered salaries would be immediately diverted into purchasing the massive amounts of compute necessary to render their former roles obsolete.
We are simply asking our most dedicated team members to look at the roadmap, and recognize that their continued reliance on biweekly paychecks is a major hurdle for our OpenAI integration.
Internal memos detailing the severance offer indicate that departing personnel will receive standard transition assistance, six months of healthcare coverage, and a complimentary one-year subscription to Microsoft Copilot to help them automatically generate cover letters for industries that have not yet been automated. The company has also reportedly begun measuring office floor plans to determine exactly how many empty cubicles must be collapsed to accommodate a single high-density server rack.
For the 75% of employees not eligible for the current buyout round, Microsoft leadership sent a follow-up email requesting that they pause breathing for two minutes every hour to help redirect the building's HVAC power to a struggling data center in Iowa.