SUSE is cutting 1 in 10 jobs, and its CEO says AI is why

Open source just got its own AI layoff memo. Enterprise Linux company SUSE is cutting about one in ten of its nearly 2,000 employees, and CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen pointed at automation and AI in his email to staff, Radhika Rajkumar reports for ZDNET, following The Register's exclusive.

Van Leeuwen's message was that AI is changing how software companies run so quickly that SUSE's current structure and costs won't get it where it needs to go. He also wrote that modern tools are already letting teams move faster with less overhead and flatter reporting lines, and that the need for some existing roles has "greatly diminished." Other roles, he said, will change over the next few years. He didn't say which tools, or whether this is about SUSE adopting AI internally.

Where SUSE sits in the trend

It isn't alone. ZDNET points to Jobloss.ai's tracker, where recent entries are mostly tech companies such as Uber, Salesforce and GitLab. Last month Microsoft announced buyouts for 60,000 employees, some in its Copilot division, to focus on AI, though heavy AI infrastructure spending likely plays a part. Squarespace announced a 19% cut this week without naming AI, in a market where vibe-coding is squeezing website builders.

There's an irony in the data, too. Where AI does seem to pay off so far, it's mostly inside tech: one economist found it has raised revenue per employee at big tech companies while leaving most other businesses unchanged. And it was only last month that Linus Torvalds wrote a Linux patch with Claude Code.

The reality check

Blaming AI for a layoff is also good messaging. It sounds like strategy instead of trouble, and it's often impossible to tell whether AI caused the cuts or was just a convenient way to explain plans that already existed. That question hung over Block's big layoffs earlier this year.

Economists also agree that the broad, cross-industry layoff wave people fear hasn't arrived. Gartner even predicts that by 2029, companies will rehire 30% of the staff they tried to replace with AI, at a higher cost, unless they rethink workforce planning.

None of that helps the people losing jobs at SUSE this month. But for everyone else in infrastructure software, the memo is worth reading closely. The roles that "greatly diminished" are the ones built around operational overhead and layers of reporting. Being the person who knows how the tooling fits together looks a lot safer than being the person who passes status updates up the chain.

Scoreboard update: AI +1. An open source company cuts 10% of its staff and names AI as the reason.

Stay undead.