As Google lays off 12,000 employees, its cloud boss Thomas Kurian sent a memo to employees within the unit to address the cuts.
Google announced the layoffs on Friday, which impacted 6% of its global workforce. US employees who were impacted have already been notified.
Google has viewed Google Cloud as a major driver of growth to provide an alternative source of revenue to supplement its massive advertising business. In the past few years, it has invested heavily in growing its sales force. Still, it has not yet reached profitability.
"We are sincerely grateful for the contributions each of these people have made to our business," Kurian wrote in a memo to Cloud employees. "It is important that each of us allow for time and space to process these changes, and support each other and our teams over the coming days."
Kurian also added that Cloud's 2023 strategy will remain "consistent with what we have had in place over the past several years."
"We will continue to expand our global Cloud region footprint and invest for growth by expanding our go-to-market organization in both sales and services teams across all our geographies and industries, including public sector," Kurian wrote. "In addition, our technical infrastructure teams will continue to deliver the critical systems and services that keep Google's products running smoothly.
A Google Cloud spokesperson pointed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai's memo about the layoffs.
Hello everyone,
I want to acknowledge how difficult these changes across Google are. In the U.S., some of our colleagues were immediately impacted. In other countries, this process will take more time as we follow local laws an nd procedures. I assure you, a lot of thought went into these decisions, and they weren't taken lightly. Some of us will be saying goodbye to team members, cross-functional business partners, and friends. We are sincerely grateful for the contributions each of these people have made to our business. It is important that each of us allow for time and space to process these changes, and support each other and our teams over the coming days.
Within Cloud, our strategy for 2023 remains consistent with what we have had in place over the past several years. In engineering, we continue to focus on investing for growth in our five key product categories: helping customers gain insights from data in a Data Cloud, enabling companies to run workloads anywhere with scalable, reliable, and open cloud infrastructure; protecting users, applications, and data from emerging cybersecurity threats; delivering new capabilities in our Vertex AI-ML Platform and solutions; and helping people communicate and collaborate seamlessly with Google Workspace. We will continue to expand our global Cloud region footprint and invest for growth by expanding our go-to-market organization in both sales and services teams across all our geographies and industries, including public sector. In addition, our technical infrastructure teams will continue to deliver the critical systems and services that keep Google's products running smoothly.
Cloud continues to be one of the largest and fastest-growing businesses within Alphabet, and remains an area of investment for the company. Today's news primarily impacted positions that were non-customer facing, non-engineering, and operational in nature. As we move forward, we will continue hiring in strategic areas, including product development and customer-facing roles that support for growth.
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