Google extends buyouts to five more countries as AI costs climb

Google is offering voluntary buyouts with severance to employees in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland as it seeks to restrain costs while investing heavily in artificial intelligence. A company spokesperson said the program was widened to those countries in June; it had begun in 2025 and previously ran only in parts of the United States and Britain. The number of accepted offers is unconfirmed, and Google has roughly 5,000 staff in Switzerland. Google Cloud and DeepMind employees are excluded, while CFO Anat Ashkenazi has identified AI and cloud computing as hiring priorities; Alphabet still had 204,757 employees at the end of September, up from 190,167 a year earlier.