According to “RayOfs DotFYI,” a website that aggregates the current status of restructuring of tech companies, 27 tech companies around the world laid off a total of 24,818 people in January this year. It is about 10 times larger than the 2,537 job cuts made by 32 companies in the same period last year.
The trend of job cuts, which has been decreasing in recent years, is on the rise again. After peaking at 264,320 in 2023, the reduction in manpower in the tech industry decreased to 152,922 in 2024 and 124,201 in 2025. However, the figure suggests a possibility of an increase again this year.
The background is the rapid development of AI technology. As AI has replaced tasks such as writing programming code, the recruitment of “junior developers” with short experience has decreased significantly. Some companies have faced a situation where existing business models are threatened by the spread of AI.
The impact of restructuring is not limited to software companies. It is evaluated that the impact will spread to cloud companies with software companies as their main customers and even AI hardware companies that supply semiconductor chips to them. At the same time, companies that judged AI as a future growth engine are also encouraging restructuring to reduce their highly uncertain business sectors.
Chung Ho-yoon, a researcher at Korea Investment & Securities, said, “As competition for AI development intensifies, the trend of all big tech aggressively absorbing developers has changed significantly in the past two to three years.”
In fact, Meta’s workforce peaked at 87,000 in the third and fourth quarters of 2022 and then decreased to 66,000 in 2023 and has increased to 78,000 now, but it does not show the same surge as in the past. It is explained that a similar trend continues in major big tech such as Microsoft (MS), Alphabet, and Amazon.
Rather, profitability indicators have improved. Meta’s per-employee revenue fell from $1.7 million in 2019 to $1.39 million in 2022, but it has since jumped to $2.59 million at the end of last year thanks to restructuring and AI-driven advertising revenue growth. Alphabet and Microsoft reported a similar trend.
“From a corporate analysis point of view, this restructuring seems to be a reasonable option,” researcher Chung said. “Tech companies are shifting to a structure that achieves high growth and profitability with fewer and fewer employees.” At the same time, he added, “From the perspective of workers, we need to prepare for changes that may come at any time.”
JENNIFER KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
