Google lays off nearly all of its Area 120 incubator staff

By “completion,” Bloomberg writes, citing an anonymous source at the company, means integrating projects directly into Google.

“We have made the difficult decision to lay off most of the Area 120 team,” a company spokesperson was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.

Area 120’s managing partner remains with the company, but other employees — that is, almost everyone who was not involved in the development of the three startups that will remain under Google’s leadership — will lose their jobs.

The incubator cuts are part of a sweeping cut at Alphabet, which is cutting a total of about 12,000 jobs, more than 6% of its workforce.

For example, in the Fuchsia team, in which about 400 people worked on the operating systems of the company’s home devices, about 16% of the workforce will be laid off.

In this sense, Alphabet follows in the footsteps of Amazon Microsoft, Salesforce and Twitter.

The CEO of the corporation explained the reductions by a change in “economic reality”: during the pandemic, the corporation grew a lot due to the increased demand for digital products, but now the situation has changed.

Launched in 2016, the Area 120 incubator gave select employees the opportunity to work at small startups (“Many of Google’s best ideas start as personal projects by enthusiastic enthusiasts,” the company commented at the time).

Google made its first round of cuts at its own incubator in September 2022, when some teams were notified that their projects would be reorganized or cancelled.

A company spokesperson said at the time that Area 120 would “shift its focus to projects based on Google’s investment in artificial intelligence that have the potential to solve important user problems.”