Microsoft has opened a voluntary exit programme for employees in India, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The company's voluntary exit offer was available to eligible employees in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Microsoft said Monday that it’s offering buyouts to a wide swath of employees as it strives to balance a costly artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out with capital efficiency. The software maker announced a new voluntary exit offer for certain workers in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom at its experience level of 70 or below. Around 60,000 people are eligible, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named while discussing an internal matter. The effort affects about 27% of Microsoft’s total workforce of 223,000 people. Microsoft has been ramping up spending on data centers to accommodate high AI computing demand, supplying cloud services to Anthropic, OpenAI and a slew of other companies. Capital expenditures for the September quarter should exceed $50 billion, Microsoft said in July. In the same quarter a year ago, capital spending and finance leases came to $34.9 billion. That’s put a strain on Microsoft’s finances. In April, it announced a first-ever voluntary…