Google Lays Off, Relocates Hundreds of ‘Core’ Employees

As mass tech layoffs continue to sweep the industry, Google is the latest company to cut and relocate employees.

According to documents obtained by CNBC, Google laid off over 200 employees who were a part of its “Core” division and will be moving another undisclosed number of employees to India and Mexico as the tech giant restructures. The layoffs occurred just days before the company announced its Q1 2024 earnings on April 25.

Per Google’s website, “Core” employees are “responsible for building the technical foundation behind Google’s flagship products” as well as protecting Google’s users’ online safety and helping maintain the company’s internal IT system to help employees “do their best work through internal tools and developer solutions.”

Nearly 50 affected employees were staffed at Google’s HQ in Sunnyvale, California, and the cuts mostly affected software engineers.

“A number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities,” a Google spokesperson told Business Insider. “Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers.”

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, meanwhile, reported a strong Q1 2024 with revenue increasing 15% to $80.54 billion from $69.79 billion at the same time a year earlier. This was the fastest rate of revenue growth for the company since 2022.

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“Our results in the first quarter reflect strong performance from Search, YouTube, and Cloud,” Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an earnings release. “We are well underway with our Gemini era and there’s great momentum across the company. Our leadership in AI research and infrastructure, and our global product footprint, position us well for the next wave of AI innovation.”

April’s job cuts follow a previous round of mass layoffs held in January where nearly 1,000 employees were let go in Google’s hardware and search division to reprioritize and expand the company’s AI sector.

“We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities,” Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, wrote in an internal email last week per CNBC.

Related: Google Wants Its Employees Back in the Office: Report

Alphabet was up over 58% year over year as of Thursday morning.