Google widens employee buyouts to five countries as AI spending bill climbs

New Delhi: Google has extended voluntary exit offers to employees in five countries as its parent company, Alphabet, seeks to control costs while investing heavily in artificial intelligence. The expansion, disclosed on Wednesday, began in June and covers selected employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland.

Confirming the move to Reuters, Google said it had widened a severance programme introduced by some teams in 2025. The number of employees who have accepted the latest offers remains unknown, and India was not among the countries identified in the report.

The most detailed account concerns Switzerland, where Google employs about 5,000 people and operates a major engineering centre in Zurich. Three people familiar with the arrangements told Reuters that the programme covered several divisions but excluded the artificial intelligence unit DeepMind.

Swiss employees were offered the packages in mid-June, received responses to their applications by mid-July and began leaving in August. Those accepting received one month’s salary for each year of service, capped at 12 months; equivalent terms have not been established for the other countries.

The financial backdrop is a sharp increase in the infrastructure spending required to develop and run AI services. During Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings call on October 28, 2026, the chief financial officer, Anat Ashkenazi, maintained the company’s full-year capital expenditure forecast at $195 billion–$205 billion and said spending would increase significantly in 2027.

Alphabet spent $51.4 billion on capital investment in the July–September quarter, predominantly on technical infrastructure supporting AI. Around 65 per cent of that infrastructure investment went towards servers and networking equipment, with the remainder allocated to data centres.

Those investments also bring continuing costs beyond the initial purchase of equipment and construction of facilities. Ashkenazi said higher depreciation and data-centre operating expenses, including energy, would weigh on the company’s finances as its infrastructure expanded.

At the same time, spending on specialist employees is rising. Alphabet reported a 36 per cent increase in research and development expenses, driven partly by compensation for AI talent as well as depreciation. That combination illustrates the company’s competing priorities – containing costs in parts of the business while financing expansion in others.

The departure offers have also coincided with growth in the overall workforce. Alphabet’s third-quarter figures showed 204,757 employees, compared with 190,167 a year earlier, underlining that selective exits do not necessarily translate into a reduction in the group’s total headcount.

Google’s use of voluntary severance predates the latest international expansion. CNBC reported in June 2025 that offers had reached US employees in its knowledge and information division, central engineering, marketing, research and communications teams.

The knowledge and information division includes Google’s search, advertising and commerce businesses, placing the earlier programme within some of its most established operations. Google had also introduced voluntary exits in its platforms and devices division, which includes Android, Chrome and Pixel, earlier in 2025.

Eligibility has varied across the organization rather than following a uniform company-wide policy. The Verge’s report on the June 2025 programme found that DeepMind, Google Cloud, YouTube and the central advertising sales organization were excluded, while an internal message presented the offer as an exit route for employees struggling with their roles or no longer aligned with the company’s strategy.