Google employees have begun circulating an internal petition titled “job security” ahead of expected cost cuts this year, CNBC has learned.

The petition has been signed by more than 1,250 employees and was viewed by CNBC. It is the latest sign of employee upheaval at Google, which has struggled to maintain high morale among its workforce after a year filled with embarrassing product rollouts, worker protests sparked by controversial enterprise contracts and continued rounds of layoffs that stretch back to 2023 and are expected to continue. 

“We, the undersigned Google workers from offices across the US and Canada, are concerned about instability at Google that impacts our ability to do high quality, impactful work,” the petition says. “Ongoing rounds of layoffs make us feel insecure about our jobs. The company is clearly in a strong financial position, making the loss of so many valuable colleagues without explanation hurt even more.”

New CFO Anat Ashkenazi said in October that one of her top priorities would be to drive more cost cutting as Google expands its spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2025.

“Any organization can always push a little further and I’ll be looking at additional opportunities,” she said, referring to cost cutting, which sparked an internal reaction. Shortly after Ashkenazi’s statements, employees pressed executives for clarity but weren’t given any more details on Ashkenazi’s plans.

The petition calls on Google CEO Sundar Pichai to offer buyouts before conducting layoffs, to guarantee severance to employees that get laid off and to not give low performance review ratings for the purpose of removing employees. The petition also calls for Google’s leadership to offer voluntary buyouts before enacting layoffs.

In the petition, Google employees call on the company’s leadership to not “force” low performance reviews to justify removing certain employees. Results from the company’s annual performance review process, known as Google Reviews and Development, or GRAD, are expected soon.

The company does not have forced rating distributions for GRAD, and every employee is rated on their performance and impact based on their role, level and the expectations they set with their manager, a spokesperson for Google told CNBC.

The petition asks for guaranteed severance equivalent to what laid off employees were offered in January 2023. That year, Google laid off more than 12,000 employees. At the time, Google executives boasted of its severance package, which included 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year employees worked at the company.

Since then, Google has continued with more rounds of layoffs throughout its various division, and impacted employees have told CNBC that their severance packages have varied.

– CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

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Microsoft is in the middle of the artificial intelligence boom, but it’s been a while since investors have seen the rewards.

The software giant’s stock price is up less than 8% in the past year. That’s by far the weakest gain among the eight U.S. tech megacap companies. Apple has the next slimmest increase at 19%, followed by Alphabet at 26%. All the others are up at least 48%, and Tesla is the top performer in the group, up 117%.

Microsoft is also badly trailing the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which has gained 25% in the past year.

That’s the backdrop heading into Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report Wednesday. The company is kicking off tech earnings season, along with Meta and Tesla. Apple follows on Thursday, and Alphabet and Amazon report next week.

The biggest question for Microsoft shareholders surrounds the company’s Azure cloud-computing business and whether it will show accelerating growth.

In October, Microsoft told investors that demand for Azure services outstripped supply because of a delay from a third-party provider. Finance chief Amy Hood said she still foresees an increase in Azure’s growth rate in the first half of 2025, but for the December quarter, she called for 31% to 32% growth at constant currency, which would be down from 34% in the prior period. Microsoft’s stock slipped 6% the next day.

Since the last quarter of 2023, Azure growth has increased by 2 percentage points. Meanwhile, top rivals Amazon and Alphabet have seen cloud growth over that stretch accelerate by 7 points and 13 points, respectively. It’s a matter of particular importance to investors, because Microsoft now has tens of billions of dollars in quarterly capital expenditures to meet cloud and AI needs of customers.

A Microsoft spokesperson didn’t provide a comment.

Microsoft operates in many other markets. But investors gravitate to cloud first, because it’s a sizable category that’s still rapidly expanding as companies continue to move away from owning and operating their own data centers and as they add heftier workloads.

Overall, Microsoft is expected to report revenue growth of 11% from a year earlier to $68.8 billion, according to LSEG. That would mark the slowest year-over-year growth for any quarter since mid-2023. Analysts expect earnings per share to increase to $3.11 from $2.93 a year ago.

Investors were more bullish on Microsoft in 2023, sending the stock up more than 50%, its best year since 2009. The driving force was Microsoft’s intimate relationship with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which sparked the generative AI boom and led to a historic increase in investments.

Microsoft is OpenAI’s leading backer, having poured nearly $14 billion into the AI startup. Through the partnership, Microsoft gets a lot of cloud business but also spends heavily on building out infrastructure.

The relationship changed in an important way last week, when Microsoft said OpenAI will no longer use Azure on an exclusive basis, except when it comes to handling incoming queries from developers. Going forward, OpenAI will have to check with Microsoft when it seeks more computing capacity, and Microsoft will be able to accept or turn away the request.

The announcement came at the same time as President Donald Trump’s introduction of Stargate, an AI infrastructure initiative involving SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle.

In its own blog post, OpenAI named Microsoft as a technology partner but not a member of the group that will build and operate Stargate, which has the potential to draw up to $500 billion in investment. Microsoft has committed to $80 billion in AI-related capital expenditures in the year that ends June 30. Much of that is being directed toward Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs.

Analysts at Cowen wrote in a report that last week’s developments could help Microsoft reaccelerate the Azure growth rate into the mid-30s. They said Microsoft has been “funding GPU capex investments for OpenAI model training but not collecting revenue,” and that by pushing some of that training elsewhere, the company can “show improved capex efficiencies and stronger returns on capital spend” while keeping its access to OpenAI.

Kevin Walkush, a portfolio manager at Jensen Investment Management, said he expects the AI investment will pay off in the long run.

“If AI doesn’t show up, there’s still a long runway for cloud,” said Walkush, whose firm held about $913 million in Microsoft shares at the end of September. “But I think the chance of AI showing up is really high, so that’s the bet I’m willing to let them make to take advantage of this opportunity.”