Alphabet’s Waymo cuts 8% of staff after second round of layoffs

Waymo, Alphabet’s driverless-vehicle unit, cut dozens of jobs as its parent company moves to control spending and focus more tightly on artificial intelligence.

Waymo confirmed the staff reduction in an email on Wednesday, saying it eliminated some engineering roles and rebalanced its headcount to take a more fiscally disciplined approach to 2023.

The layoffs represent Waymo’s second round of cuts this year, following a widescale reduction at Alphabet.

The parent company, which also owns Google and YouTube, slashed 12,000 jobs globally in January.

In all, more than 200 employees have been let go from Waymo this year, the Information reported earlier — or about 8 per cent of its workforce.

The move is part of a broader culling of tech jobs, with Meta Platforms, Twitter and Amazon.com, all slashing their ranks in recent months.

Though Alphabet initially moved more slowly in making cutbacks than its industry peers, investor pressure and a sluggish digital-advertising economy forced the tech giant to catch up. It permanently shuttered Stadia, its cloud gaming service, in January, ahead of the broader layoffs.

Read: Microsoft plans 10,000 job cuts, will take $1.2bn charge

Alphabet also eliminated a total of more than 240 jobs at Verily, its life-sciences unit, and at Intrinsic, an industrial robotics venture. Later, it cut most of the jobs at Area 120, its in-house incubator for new initiatives, after cancelling projects across the unit in September.

Read: Amazon to slash more than 18,000 jobs