Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the company’s Ignite Spotlight event in Seoul on Nov. 15, 2022.
SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft said Wednesday that it’s letting go of 10,000 employees through March 31 as the software maker braces for slower revenue growth. The company is also taking a $1.2 billion charge.
Alphabet, Amazon and Salesforce are among the technology companies that have lowered head count in recent weeks. The contraction comes after demand for cloud computing and collaboration services picked up as enterprises, government agencies and schools encouraged remote work to reduce Covid exposure.
related investing news
Rising prices have prompted companies to become more careful about technology spending, hurting prospects for the tech stocks that outperformed other market sectors year after year. Now Microsoft and its peers are taking stock. In July Microsoft said it will trim less than 1% of employees, and in October it confirmed an additional round of job cuts that reportedly affected fewer than 1,000 workers.
“I’m confident that Microsoft will emerge from this stronger and more competitive,” CEO Satya Nadella told employees in a memo that was posted on Microsoft’s website. The move will reduce Microsoft’s head count by less than 5%, and some employees will find out this week if they’re losing their jobs, he wrote.
Microsoft shares moved modestly higher at the U.S. open after the announcement.
Employees in the U.S. who are eligible for benefits will receive severance that’s above the market, health care and stock vesting for six months. and 60 days’ notice before their work ends, Nadella wrote.
Nadella reiterated trends in the business climate that he has described in recent months.
“As we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less,” he wrote. “We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one.”
Earlier this month Nadella had indicated the company might have to make adjustments.
“I think for us as a global company, we’re not going to be immune from what’s happening in the macro,” he said in an interview with CNBC-TV18. “We will have to also get our own sort of operational focus on making sure our expenses are in line with our revenue growth.”
Microsoft has called for 2% revenue growth in the fiscal second quarter, which would be the slowest rate since 2016.
Major layoffs aren’t an annual exercise for 47-year-old Microsoft, but they do happen occasionally. In 2017 Microsoft laid off thousands of employees in a broad reorganization of its sales unit. In 2014, following the acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services business, Microsoft cut 18,000 people.
The charge relates to severance, hardware and the cost of lease consolidation, Nadella wrote.
“Every one of us and every team across the company must raise the bar and perform better than the competition to deliver meaningful innovation that customers, communities, and countries can truly benefit from,” Nadella wrote. “If we deliver on this, we will emerge stronger and thrive long into the future; it’s as simple as that.”
CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 15, 2025.
Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty Images
Palantir‘s stock slumped more than 9% on Tuesday, falling for a fifth straight day to continue its pullback from all-time highs.
The artificial intelligence software provider’s stock has slid more than 15% over the last five trading sessions, after a stellar earnings report earlier this month propelled shares to all-time highs. The report was Palantir’s first-ever $1 billion revenue quarter.
Tuesday’s dip coincided with a broader market pullback.
Palantir is the most significant gainer to date in the S&P 500 in 2025, up more than 100%.
Read more CNBC tech news
Shares have more than doubled as the company benefits from ongoing AI enthusiasm, scooping up government contracts with President Donald Trump pushing to overhaul agencies.
Palantir’s ascent has pushed the company into a list of top 10 U.S. tech firms and 20 most valuable U.S. companies, while also making shares incredibly expensive to own. Its forward price-to-earnings ratio, which tracks future earnings relative to share price, has soared past 245 times.
By comparison, technology giants such as Microsoft and Apple carry a P/E of nearly 30 times and rake in significantly greater quarterly revenues. Meta‘s and Alphabet‘s P/E ratios hover in the 20s.
The data analytics software vendor said Tuesday that it’s raising a funding round that values the company at over $100 billion. That would make Databricks just the fourth private company to eclipse the $100 billion mark, following SpaceX, ByteDance and OpenAI, according to data from CB Insights.
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan that the total round will exceed $1 billion. The company was last valued by private investors at $62 billion in a $10 billion financing round late last year.
In June, Databricks executives told investors the company was forecasting $3.7 billion in annualized revenue by July, with 50% year-over-year growth.
Snowflake, one of Databricks’ top rivals, is expected to generate $4.5 billion in revenue for the fiscal year that ends in January, representing annual growth of 25%, according to LSEG. Snowflake currently has a market cap of about $65 billion. Other competitors include cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, which are also Databricks partners.
Ghodsi said he heard from a lot of interested investors following Figma’s IPO late last month. Shares of the design software company more than tripled in their New York Stock Exchange debut, a sign that public investors are seeking out tech offerings after in extended lull in the IPO market.
“My phone was blowing up,” Ghodsi said on Tuesday. “So yes, there’s definitely been a big push from outside.”
Figma shares have since retreated from their initial $115.50 closing price. The stock is trading at about $70, still more than double the $33 IPO price.
Ghodsi said the round will help Databricks invest in products that clients can tap when using artificial intelligence models.
Founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, Databricks ranked third on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list. As of June, the company employed 8,000 people. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners Thrive Capital and WCM Investment Management are buying shares, a spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, the price of bitcoin pulled back nearly 3% to just over $113,000. Ether was down more than 4% to the $4,100 level, according to Coin Metrics.
Stock Chart IconStock chart icon
Bitcoin over the past day
Investors appeared to rotate out of tech names on Tuesday. The sector had seen a boost last week as traders weighed the prospect of more interest rate cuts. Also, bitcoin touched an intraday all-time high near $125,000 last week.
On Tuesday, the Nasdaq Composite was down more than 1%, weighed down by declines in Nvidia and other tech heavyweights.
The crypto market tends to be vulnerable to moves in tech stocks due to their growth-oriented investor base, narrative-driven price action, speculative nature and tendency to thrive in low-interest rate environments.
This week, investors are watching the Federal Reserve’s annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo. for clues around what could happen at the central bank’s remaining policy meetings this year. If Fed Chair Jerome Powell signals more dovish policy could be ahead, crypto may bounce.
“With Powell speaking at Jackson Hole, we typically see profit-taking ahead of his remarks,” said Satraj Bambra, CEO of hybrid exchange Rails. “Any time there’s communication uncertainty from the Fed, you can generally expect some profit-taking as traders de-risk their positions.”