Team Blitz India
EVEN as there are indications of a deterioration in ties between Washington and Beijing over Artificial Intelligence and clean energy, reports have come about tech giant Microsoft asking “hundreds” of its employees in China to consider moving to other countries.
According to China’s state-run news website The Paper, the company has offered its employees – most of them working in cloud computing – an opportunity to work in the United States, Australia or Ireland, among other countries. The website headlined a story on May 16, ‘Hundreds of people from Microsoft’s Chinese AI team ‘packaged’ abroad? Employees report receiving an email asking for a move’.
Deadline fixed
The report said that on May 15, several netizens “broke the news on social media such as Maimai and Xiaohongshu that hundreds of employees of Microsoft China, mainly the AI team of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform in China, received company emails asking if employees were willing to move to other regions to work, including the United States, Australia, Ireland and other countries.”
The company, it said, “will be responsible for the family visa issue, and the employee will need to respond by June 7.”
Some Microsoft employees told The Paper that “the situation is true, this is the news that just came out on May 14, and some employees suddenly received an email about the recruitment to move overseas to work, asking to answer whether to go or not before June 7”.
Everyone confused
It quoted employees saying everyone is very confused, and that no one felt “any signs before. Especially for employees who drag their families with them, ‘there are more things to consider’. Some colleagues thought that this was a ‘disguised layoff’, and although they could choose not to go, they also worried about the future of staying in the company,” the news item added. Similar reports were carried in other news platforms in China and the US.
While CNN said that Microsoft has asked “at least 100 of its employees in China to consider moving to other countries”, quoting China state media reports, The Register reported that (Microsoft China) “Office could be decimated with around 800 offers reportedly made”. On May 16, the Wall Street Journal reported the development, adding “The proposal comes as the Biden Administration seeks to put tighter curbs around Beijing’s capability to develop state-ofthe-art AI – a crackdown that carries the potential to touch American companies with operations in China.”
