Intel’s latest cuts land in the data center group as earnings loom

Intel is preparing another round of layoffs, this time inside the data center group that sits at the center of its AI-server recovery story.

The company told workers in the unit to expect reductions, with no public count yet for affected employees or for Oregon, where Intel remains the state’s largest corporate employer. In a statement, Intel said the cuts are part of a “broader strategy to become a more focused and efficient company,” and that the data center group is aligning roles and skills for longer-term success techtarget.

The move is notable because it lands in a business investors have recently treated as one of Intel’s brighter spots. KGW, citing company annual reports, said Intel’s global headcount fell from 125,000 at the end of 2023 to 85,000 at the end of 2025, while its Oregon workforce dropped from a recent peak of 23,000 to about 20,200 before the company announced 3,200 Oregon layoffs last year techtarget. Portland Business Journal reported Monday that the latest cuts target efficiencies in the data center group [0].

The timing is awkward. Intel is due to report quarterly results this week, and its data center and AI product category generated $5.5 billion in first-quarter revenue, up 22% from a year earlier, according to KGW. That still trailed the company’s PC processor group, which posted $7.7 billion in sales and grew just 1% techtarget.

Intel has said the latest reductions will not change product commitments or company road maps, according to Seeking Alpha, which also reported that the scope of the cuts is still unknown bizjournals. That caveat matters: the company is trying to lower costs without undercutting its ability to compete in server CPUs, chip packaging and foundry services.

The layoffs extend a restructuring that has already been painful. OregonLive reported that Intel began broad cuts in 2025 after CEO Lip-Bu Tan told employees the company needed to become leaner, faster and more efficient kgw. A separate OregonLive report said Intel planned to lay off 529 Oregon employees in an initial round, including engineers, managers and vice presidents, while larger reductions were expected across the company oregonlive.

Intel’s pressure is not only internal. TechTarget’s timeline of the company’s decline points to share losses against AMD and Arm-based designs, manufacturing stumbles versus TSMC and a weak position in AI accelerators dominated by Nvidia informationweek. InformationWeek’s 2026 layoff tracker also frames Intel’s cuts as part of a wider tech-industry push to shrink teams while redirecting spending toward AI and infrastructure seekingalpha.

The question now is whether Intel can keep enough engineering momentum in data center chips while continuing to cut. For a turnaround built on execution, the risk is that efficiency starts to look like another constraint.