“If you're willing to recognize your mistakes, you massively tilt the odds in your favor.” -FS👋 Welcome {{first name | }}
This week the layoffs showed up in disguise, and we're here to rip the mask off. Intel took a blade to its fastest-growing AI unit and called it "efficiency." Verizon, Samsung, and Exodus cut workers while flipping through a thesaurus for a nicer word. Inside: who actually got hit, a fresh roast of the tech characters who earned it, a company giving away free cybersecurity training, four startups signing checks, and the exact playbook for spotting your own layoff 90 days out. Grab coffee. Let's get into it.
TL;DR
Intel took an axe to its AI and data-center group, the one that grew 22% last quarter
Spot your layoff 90 days before HR does
Verizon "franchised" 3,000 store jobs, Samsung "relocated" 739, Exodus "pivoted" out a quarter of its staff.
🚨: The Big Story
Intel guts a division that grew 22%
What happened: On July 20, Intel started fresh layoffs in its Data Center and AI Group, the unit that pulled in $5.05 billion last quarter and grew 22% year over year. Intel didn't give a number. It called the move getting "focused and efficient," and dropped it the same week as its Q2 earnings (July 23, after the close), as part of a workforce reduction that's trimmed roughly 15% of the company under CEO Lip-Bu Tan. Source
Why it matters: Every layoff newsletter (this one included) tells you to pivot toward AI and data-center roles, because that's where the hiring is. Intel just cut people from exactly that division while it was growing. If the fastest-growing corner of a chip giant isn't safe, "AI-adjacent" is a probability, not a force field.
Our take: This wasn't a failing business. A division up 22% doesn't get cut for performance; it gets cut for a story, and the story Wall Street wants the day before earnings is "efficiency." Tan is trading working engineers for a share-price sentence. Cutting your best-growing unit to look disciplined is a choice, and the people who built that 22% are the ones paying for it. Chase the AI roles anyway (that's still where the openings are), but stop treating any one skill category as a bunker. The only real hedge is a second skill, a warm network, and a runway.
What to watch:
Intel's Q2 earnings (July 23, after close). Soft guidance next to these cuts usually means the next round is already drafted.
Whether "focused and efficient" jumps to other chipmakers' AI teams. The language travels fast.
Your move:
Retraining into AI or data-center work? Keep going, but pair it with a second marketable skill and a network you actually talk to.
Track Intel's WARN filings in Oregon, California, and Arizona for the real headcount Intel won't say out loud.
📉 The Layoff Report
Verizon franchises, Samsung relocates, Exodus pivots
Verizon: Announced July 16. Offloading 274 company-owned stores to franchisees (roughly 3,000 retail workers pushed off Verizon's payroll) and cutting 500 corporate roles on top, days before its July 24 earnings call. New CEO, same math. Source
Samsung: Announced July 18. Cutting 739 jobs at its New Jersey electronics HQ (plus about 100 in Plano, Texas) as it "relocates" to Texas by year-end. The semiconductor division, busy cashing in on AI-memory demand, was left untouched. Source
Exodus: Announced July 20. The crypto-wallet maker is cutting 25% of its global workforce to pivot into stablecoin payments, the same week it took fresh Benchmark backing. Money in one door, people out the other. Source
ZA/UM: Announced July 18. The Disco Elysium studio laid off 32 people, two months after shipping Zero Parades to strong reviews and soft sales. Great reviews don't make payroll. Source
Bottom line: 2026's tally is past 168,459 people across 464 events per TrueUp. The language keeps getting softer while the checks keep getting cashed. "Franchising," "relocation," "pivot": read the fine print, because none of them come with your name on the keep list.
☀ The Bright Spot
ThreatLocker gives away Zero Trust training free
ThreatLocker, a fast-growing Orlando cybersecurity firm, just launched a no-cost Zero Trust Cybersecurity Bootcamp: free training pointed straight at one of the few tech niches still hiring hard, no tuition, no catch. The company's been rapidly adding headcount while it's at it. Free skills in a field that's still short-staffed. More of this. Source
🍵 Spill the Tea
Scored on how loud, how bad.
New around here: a weekly roast of the tech characters who earned it, scored on two axes, how loud they got and how bad it looked. Names invented, behavior not. Spotted, upper Valencia.
Thatcher Ainsworth-Doyle: 9.1 loud / 9.3 bad. Cut a division that grew 22% and called it "getting focused." Sent the memo from seat 2A. Used the word "family" twice in the note that ended 500 people's health insurance.
Corbin Vale: 6 loud / 9.9 bad. Spent 90 minutes on a podcast explaining that a layoff is "a gift" and "the universe rebalancing." Has been laid off zero times. Has been handed two companies and a newsletter.
The Fund That Tweets "AI Ate Your Job": 8.7 loud / 8.4 bad. Posted a 2,000-word thread on how engineers are obsolete, then posted 11 open engineering reqs 40 minutes later. Obsolescence, apparently, begins the day after the term sheet clears.
Preston Calloway-Voss: 7.4 loud / 8.9 bad. DM'd a few thousand laid-off workers that unemployment is "the entrepreneurship bootcamp you didn't know you needed." Enrollment: $499. The bootcamp is a Notion doc and a Calendly link.
Margaux Everly-Hart: 10 loud / 2 bad. Full marks for volume, partial credit for grace: laid off 40 people, then published every name (with permission), the real severance terms, and a referral list she works personally. Went quiet after. The good kind of quiet. Do this one.
The lesson, darlings: nobody minds that you made it. They mind the pretending it was hard. See you next week. XOXO.
🧑✈ Career CoPilot
Spot your layoff 90 days before HR does
Intel called its cuts "focused and efficient" the same week it reported earnings. That phrase wasn't random; it's one of a handful of tells that show up before the axe does. You can't stop a layoff, but you can almost always see it coming. Here's how to build your own early-warning system.
Read the earnings call, not the press release. Pull your employer's next call transcript (free on the investor-relations page or Motley Fool) and search it for "efficiency," "focused," "prioritize," and "optimize." When leadership starts grading itself on discipline, headcount is the line item it cuts to prove the point.
Watch the three-move combo. Return-to-office mandate, then a hiring freeze in your group, then a "reorg." Any two of those inside a quarter is a countdown, not a coincidence.
Measure your distance from revenue. The closer your work sits to a dollar the company actually counts, the harder you are to cut. If you're in a cost center, ship one thing this quarter that ties your name to revenue, and make sure your manager can repeat it in a single sentence.
Set the alert you'd otherwise forget. A Google Alert for your company plus "layoffs" or "WARN," and a monthly look at your state's public WARN filings. The filing frequently goes public before the all-hands does.
Pack a go-bag before you need it. Your contacts exported off the work laptop, a portfolio that lives outside the company wiki, and one reference already asked. Assemble it calm, so you never have to assemble it panicked.
👀 Companies to Watch
CuspAI's $450M, Meshy's $400M, Cognizant's 1,500 grads
CuspAI: Just raised a $450M Series B (July 20) to build AI for materials discovery across semiconductors, batteries, and clean energy. Cambridge, UK, and staffing up on ML and research engineering. Careers
Meshy: Banked a ~$400M Series B (July 21) for AI 3D-asset generation used across games, design, and manufacturing. Silicon Valley; fresh money means fresh reqs in product and infra. Careers
LiveKit: Real-time voice and video infrastructure for AI apps (the plumbing behind a lot of voice agents). Hiring remote across the US and Canada, and posted in this month's HN thread. Careers
Cognizant: On track to hire 1,500 US college graduates in 2026 for AI-era roles, one of the biggest early-career bets in the industry while others freeze junior hiring. Worth a look if you're new-grad or pivoting in. Source
When the layoff comes wrapped in a nicer word, the move is the same: read the fine print, collect your proof, and point your search at the doors that are actually open. You've done harder things than this.
Stay sharp. Stay ready.
The Offboard Team