Alphabet has widened its voluntary severance programme, offering fresh rounds of buyouts to employees in its Knowledge & Information division, central engineering, and even core search and advertising teams as it reshapes operations around artificial-intelligence products and battles antitrust scrutiny in the United States and Europe. According to an internal memo from Nick Fox, who heads the Knowledge & Information group, eligible U.S. staff are being offered 14 weeks of base pay plus one additional week for every year of service, accelerated stock-option vesting and six months of health insurance. The plan builds on a programme launched earlier this year that targeted roughly 25,000 workers tied to Google’s operating-system projects; Alphabet has not disclosed how many employees are expected to accept the latest offer. The move follows Alphabet’s 12,000-person layoff in 2023 and underscores a broader shift among large technology companies toward quieter head-count reductions as they divert resources to high-priority AI initiatives. Industry tracker Layoffs.fyi counts 62,832 job cuts across 141 tech firms in the first half of 2025, while peers such as Microsoft and Amazon are also dangling voluntary exit packages—worth about 16 weeks and three months of salary respectively—to trim payrolls without high-profile layoff announcements.