Microsoft Corp has decided to freeze pay for all full-time workers this year to help it navigate macroeconomic ructions, becoming the latest US tech leader to tighten its belt during a time of mounting uncertainty.
Chief executive officer Satya Nadella said in an internal memo the move is necessary to generate “enough yield” to invest in the major platform shift toward artificial intelligence (AI).
Microsoft had already raised compensation last year, he added.
Photo: Reuters
However, the company would consider raising rates for hourly workers while maintaining a bonus and stock award program without “overfunding” it, Nadella said without elaborating.
“As a company we recognize that navigating both a dynamic economic environment and a major platform shift requires us to make critical decisions in how we invest in our people,” a company spokesperson said.
Insider first reported on the pay freeze earlier on Wednesday.
Tech firms have downsized and slashed expenses globally to account for tepid consumer demand and shore up finances ahead of a potential recession. This year, Microsoft began cutting thousands of jobs, joining peers from Meta Platforms Inc to Amazon.com Inc.
The software leader last month reported quarterly profit and sales that topped projections, and is making massive bets on AI.
Those include a reported US$10 billion of new investment into OpenAI Inc and a Bing Internet search chatbot — a strategy to juice sales of Azure cloud services, search ads and office-productivity programs.
“As a senior leadership team, we don’t take this decision lightly, having considered it over several months,” Nadella said in his memo. “This year the economic conditions are very different across many dimensions, including customer demand, the labor market, and the investments required for the next cycle of innovation.”
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
PARTNERSHIPS: TSMC said it has been working with multiple memorychip makers for more than two years to provide a full spectrum of solutions to address AI demand Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has been collaborating with multiple memorychip makers in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in artificial intelligence (AI) applications for more than two years, refuting South Korean media report's about an unprecedented partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. As Samsung is competing with TSMC for a bigger foundry business, any cooperation between the two technology heavyweights would catch the eyes of investors and experts in the semiconductor industry. “We have been working with memory partners, including Micron, Samsung Memory and SK Hynix, on HBM solutions for more than two years, aiming to advance 3D integrated circuit
Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
RSS