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Dell is cutting more staff, its second round of mass layoffs in the past 15 months.
Two Dell sales executives broke the news in an internal memo to employees on Monday, Bloomberg reports. Dell is switching up its sales teams to put a big emphasis on AI products and make changes to how it handles data center sales, which are in demand as AI firms look to train their latest models.
"We are getting leaner," says the internal memo from Dell's Bill Scannell and John Byrne. "We’re streamlining layers of management and reprioritizing where we invest."
In a statement to The Register, Dell said: "We are combining teams and prioritizing where we invest across the company. We continually evolve our business, so we're set up to deliver the best innovation, value, and service to our customers and partners."
While Dell has confirmed the layoffs, it hasn't revealed how many employees are losing their jobs. SiliconAngle reports that roughly 12,500 Dell employees are being laid off this week, citing an unnamed source. Impacted employees are primarily on Dell's sales and marketing teams. A layoff tracker has since reported the same number.
Former Dell employee Ian Armstrong, who previously worked on the company's UX design team for eight years, called the layoffs a "bloodbath" in a post, reporting that Dell has now laid off 24,500 staff in the past 15 months. Dell previously laid off 13,000 employees in the past fiscal year, with about half of those cuts occurring in February last year.
As of February, Dell had about 120,000 employees, meaning this week's layoffs likely amount to a workforce reduction of roughly 10%. PCMag reached out to Dell for comment.
Dell's mass layoffs come less than a week after Intel made a similar announcement. Last week, Intel confirmed it's cutting 15,000 jobs to "align our cost structure" and "fundamentally change the way we operate."