Economic uncertainty, high interest rates, and the accelerating shift towards automation and artificial intelligence continue to drive mass layoffs across the tech sector. It’s not just individuals being made redundant; entire roles that were once deemed essential are disappearing from the workforce.
In response to this trend, the team at RationalFX investigated the wave of layoffs, analysing the number of job cuts that have occurred so far in 2025. Based on figures from several sources, including TrueUp, TechCrunch, and multiple state WARN databases, we identified the companies with the most significant workforce reductions. So far in 2025, more than 166 thousand people have been laid off in the global tech sector, and if the trend continues at the same rate, this number will exceed 235,000 by the end of the year.
American companies, in particular, seem to be doubling down on downsizing and cost-cutting efforts, letting go of more than 118 thousand employees not only in the United States but also in their offshore offices and manufacturing plants. The company cutting the most jobs so far in 2025 is Intel, which had close to 109,000 employees at the end of 2024 and, by the end of this year, plans to reduce headcount to 75,000, according to Reuters, effectively slashing more than 30 thousand positions.
With the biggest tech hub in the world located in the US, it is no wonder that the vast majority of layoffs in 2025 are being reported by American companies. Currently, job cuts at US-based firms account for 71% of the 166,387 recorded worldwide. Along with Intel, which has been reducing its headcount since last year, another tech giant to carry out mass cuts is Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest information technology and services company. With its planned 12,000 reductions, India’s total layoffs exceed 17,000. Panasonic’s recent 4% workforce reduction, affecting 10,000 jobs, has pushed Japan into third place. The Japanese technology conglomerate’s latest layoffs aim to boost profitability and streamline operations.
Switzerland, despite not being among the largest technology hubs in the world, is also one of the countries where some of this year’s most notable mass layoffs are occurring. STMicroelectronics, one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, announced in January that it would let go of about 3,000 employees. In June, the Plan-les-Ouates-based company said it planned to reduce its workforce by 5,000 over a three-year period.
The tech industry in Sweden has also suffered a blow in 2025, with more than 3,000 people losing their jobs as a result of the recent bankruptcy of battery manufacturer Northvolt. Despite talks that the new owner would keep some of the positions, it is still unclear whether the employees will be retained. Following the bankruptcy, American battery company Lyten acquired all remaining Northvolt assets – not just in Sweden, but also in Germany and Poland. Other countries that have seen thousands of tech roles cut include Indonesia, Israel and the UK.
Tech Companies Boost Profits While Trimming Global Workforces
Over the past few years, Microsoft’s revenue has continued to grow steadily, as reflected in its 2025 quarterly financial results. The company reported $76.44 billion in revenue for the three months ending June 30, a 18% year-over-year increase, and a net income of $27.23 billion, up 24%. Despite its strong financial performance, the U.S. tech giant is also leading a wave of layoffs, not even sparing management and senior positions in the company.
Since the beginning of 2025, Microsoft has laid off more than 19,000 employees across various divisions and departments. This includes a limited number of performance-based layoffs in January, reductions within its Xbox division, as well as another 6,000 job cuts announced in May. In its latest round, the company said it would further reduce headcount, eliminating management positions across different teams and regions.
Another U.S.-based tech giant laying off employees this year is Meta, despite positive financial results for 2024 and the strong performance reported for the second quarter of this year. The company achieved a 22% year-over-year increase in sales to $47.52 billion, while net income climbed to $18.34 billion, up 38% from last year. The Facebook parent also reported 43% operating margin, as well as strong AI-driven ad growth.
Nevertheless, Meta has already laid off at least 3,720 employees since the start of the year while pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. In June, it invested $14.3 billion in ScaleAI and acquired a 49% stake in the AI training-data start-up. Meanwhile, ScaleAI laid off roughly 200 employees, or 14% of its staff; its founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, however, joined Meta as the head of the new Superintelligence Labs. Later, another twelve contractors from Scale’s Red Team were let go due to performance-based issues, according to BusinessInsider.
AI & Automation Eliminate Thousands of Positions
As new advances in artificial intelligence and automation technologies are being announced on a weekly basis, many companies have started implementing them to enhance productivity and streamline various processes. While many focus on training their staff to use these technologies, a growing number of businesses decide to replace employees with automation and AI tools. Many tech companies are cutting data-centric roles as they shift their focus toward cloud and AI-related positions, although this trend seems to be spreading way beyond the tech sector.
Hospitality giant Marriott International and Dutch banking corporation ING and just two of the dozens of big players who are now fully leveraging customer service chatbots, for instance. UK telecom BT said it would be cutting 55,000 jobs, with the number representing both hired employees and contractors by 2030. Around 10,000 roles will be filled by AI, while the company is currently focusing on expanding its fiber and 5G technologies, digitizing, and implementing AI. In its latest annual report, it said that 48,000 employees were already actively using AI productivity tools. By the end of March 2025, BT employed around 85,300 people, roughly 6,400 fewer than at the same time in 2024.
In technology, however, these shifts are happening at the speed of light, with some companies already openly replacing human employees with automation tools, chatbots, and enterprise AI. Education technology firm Chegg announced earlier this year that it was laying off 248 employees, about 22% of its workforce, after making significant investments in its AI-powered learning assistant, which was built using OpenAI’s GPT-4.
One of the massive waves of layoffs emerging as a result of automation and artificial intelligence tools, as well as a result of relocating operations outside the United States, has been at IBM. The tech giant, which despite its long history in innovation and cutting-edge technology development, seems to be left behind in the race for generative AI. With roughly 9,000 layoffs this year, the Armonk-based company aims at streamlining its operations, cutting costs, and focusing new efforts in quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
Human resources and financial management software company Workday recently laid off 1,750 employees while investing in AI and hiring for AI-focused roles. Duolingo, the popular language learning app, has also reportedly replaced hundreds of positions with AI tools in a ‘strategic shift toward an “AI-first” approach, ’ announced by CEO Luis von Ahn in April. Following a huge backlash not just by employees but by customers online, he was forced to clarify that the company would not be laying off employees; rather, a person would be hired only if the AI cannot do the job it is tasked with properly. Over the past year and a half, Duolingo has eliminated hundreds of contractor positions.
Another notable example is Salesforce, which slashed its customer support workforce nearly in half thanks to AI. CEO Marc Benioff recently announced the company was able to reduce its customer support from 9,000 positions to around 5,000 by using AI agents. Chinese company Bytedance, the parent of TikTok, has also eliminated hundreds of roles, putting human jobs in the hands of AI. In early August, 150 employees from the company’s Trust and Safety Department team in Berlin were said to have received termination notices, prompting protests in front of the local office. As part of Bydance’s global shift to replace human moderation with artificial intelligence, another team of content moderators were later laid off in the United Kingdom. It is still unclear how many roles were slashed there, but it is assumed the number is close to that in Germany. Other major tech companies laying off human workers in favor of automation and AI are Cisco, Klarna, and Intuit.
Manufacturing Giants Lead in Tech Layoffs in 2025
Following last year’s 15,000 layoffs, it seems that Santa Clara-based semiconductor and computer-components manufacturer Intel is doubling down on job cuts as a means of reducing costs. Initially, the company announced that it would reduce its workforce by a whopping 20% by the end of the year. The news came after a new CEO took over, while the company’s financial woes continued into 2025, when it reported a net loss of $821 million for Q1 and another $2.9 billion in losses for Q2.
From 108,900 employees at the end of 2024, the total headcount is expected to fall to around 75,000 by the end of this year, according to official announcements. This means that in 2025 alone, Intel is laying off roughly 31% of its workforce, or 33,900 employees.
Microsoft has also initiated mass layoffs this year, with the recent dismissal of more than 9,000 individuals described by CEO Satya Nadella as “necessary” for the AI transformation the company is envisioning. July’s announcement of job reductions is just the latest round for the tech giant, which is expected to have let go of roughly 19,000 employees by the end of the year.
India’s largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Services, was among the tech giants announcing workforce reductions in July. The company, which is part of the massive business conglomerate Tata Group, said it would cut 12,000 jobs, mostly middle- and senior-level positions. The move, which will affect roughly 2% of the company’s workforce until April 2026, is not solely the result of AI implementation, according to TCS CEO K. Krithivasan; it is part of a broader transformation aimed at making the company more “agile” and ready for the new technologies continually emerging in the sector. Like many others, TCS now needs employees with a different set of skills – skills that were not required just a couple of years ago.
Similar to the rest of the businesses mentioned here, IBM, one of the oldest and largest technology companies in the United States, has recently faced increased operational costs, along with shifting demand and changing market conditions. Although the company has not revealed any details on the laid-off employees, it is believed that the restructuring affected mostly its HR department, as well as marketing teams and financial operations positions: all non-tech jobs that could at least partially be replaced by AI. IBM automated routine HR tasks such as drafting emails, analysing spreadsheets, and managing internal queries.
Panasonic announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide as part of efforts to reduce costs and boost profit margins. Microsoft, on the other hand, has announced workforce reductions on two separate occasions in 2025. The first round targeted about 1% of its employees, around 2,000 people, based on performance. Later, the company revealed a second wave of layoffs affecting approximately 6,840 employees, representing roughly 3% of its total workforce.
Social media and communications company Meta has reduced the size of its workforce several times throughout 2025. The latest round saw 100 employees in Reality Labs, the company’s augmented- and virtual-reality unit, dismissed. In total, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has laid off at least 3,720 employees since the beginning of the year.
Semiconductor manufacturing and design company STMicroelectronics initially announced plans to lay off 3,000 workers by 2027, but the number later climbed to 5,000. The company’s 2024 annual report reveals that it employs 11,500 people in France and 12,700 in Italy. The Italian and French governments own a combined 27.5% share of STMicroelectronics, and there is currently a strong push from both governments to limit the number of layoffs to 1,000 in Rome and the same number in France. It is unclear how many will be laid off this year, but media reports estimate that between 2,000 and 5,000 employees could lose their jobs.
Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt had long been struggling financially until, in March, it was forced to file for bankruptcy and cease operations. With most battery production centred in China, Japan and South Korea, Northvolt was founded as Europe’s answer to reducing dependence on suppliers from other continents. However, following its collapse, at least 3,000 employees were said to have been left jobless, including those at Northvolt’s massive factory in Skellefteå.
California & Silicon Valley: A Tech Hub & Centre of Job Cuts
As expected given the state’s high concentration of technology companies, California has spearheaded layoffs in the US tech sector this year, with 58,809 job cuts. These account for 51% of all tech layoffs in the country. Companies headquartered in California with the largest layoffs in 2025 include Intel, Salesforce, Meta, HP, Workday, and Autodesk.
Washington State, another major hub for technology companies, has seen 25,276 tech jobs cut since the start of the year, accounting for 22% of all tech layoffs in the US. The largest cuts in Washington have occurred at Microsoft, Amazon, Blue Origin, Redfin and Expedia.
Over in Texas, there have been at least 8,976 job cuts from 15 different tech companies this year. Among them are Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Indeed, CrowdStrike, Match Group, and Bumble. Even more layoffs have been announced by companies based in New York State this year, 11,141 laid-off employees in total. The vast majority of the slashed positions have been at IBM, while fewer layoffs took place at businesses such as Yotpo, Vimeo, and Peloton.
Massachusetts ranks fifth with 2,632 of the 118,151 job cuts in the US. The companies with the most layoffs in the state include Wayfair (1,070), Brightcove (450), Symbotic (400) and Tripadvisor (150).
The Current State of the Tech Industry in 2025
The tech sector was hit hardest in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, with nearly a million jobs lost since 2021. In 2025, the ongoing wave of mass layoffs appears to be driven by automation, AI-driven job displacement and broader cost-cutting strategies. While roles easily replaced by automation were the first to go, Microsoft’s previous round of 6,000 layoffs, including a prominent AI director, shows that even senior positions are no longer secure.
Hiring managers are placing greater emphasis on AI development as a core skill when evaluating candidates. Historically, when jobs have been at risk, companies have often turned to reskilling their workforce to mitigate the impact of potential layoffs. Some executives, such as TCS’s K. Krithivasan, however, say that redeployment and finding new positions for current employees simply to avoid layoffs do not work. Only time will tell whether tech companies will continue to focus on cost-cutting and downsizing throughout 2025, or whether advancements in AI will lead to the creation of new roles and opportunities in the technology market.
Between 1 January and 15 September 2025, more than 166,000 employees were laid off in the technology sector. We estimate that, on average, 645 workers have lost their jobs every day since the start of the year and, at this pace, the tech industry is set to let go of another 69,005 people by year-end. If the trend continues, calculations show that total tech-sector layoffs in 2025 could reach 235,392.
Methodology
For this report, the team at RationalFX examined all reported tech-company layoffs since the beginning of 2025, sourced from the IT job portal TrueUp.io. We also searched additional sources, including TechCrunch, Layoffs.fyi, and several WARN databases. These are publicly available announcements providing advance notice in cases of qualified plant closures and mass layoffs as required by the US Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.
Layoff figures were first aggregated at company level to determine the total job cuts per firm. Next, companies were classified by the country in which they are headquartered, providing insight into the geographic distribution of layoffs. To highlight the most significant workforce reductions, firms were ranked by the number of jobs eliminated, while countries were ranked based on the total layoffs reported by companies operating within them.