Apple is laying off about 600 employees following the cancellation of the Apple Car project.
According to Bloomberg News on the 4th (local time), Apple has laid off more than 600 employees due to the termination of the Apple Car and smartwatch display projects.
Apple submitted a report containing this information to the California state government in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.
Bloomberg estimated that among the approximately 600 laid-off employees, 87 were involved in Apple’s next-generation display development, and 371 were related to the Apple Car project. It also noted that since Apple had hired personnel for these projects in other regions such as Arizona, the total scope of workforce reduction could exceed 600.
In February, Apple scrapped the autonomous electric vehicle "Apple Car" project, which it had been developing for 10 years since 2014 with an investment of about $10 billion (approximately 13.532 trillion KRW). Some employees who were working on the Apple Car project have reportedly been reassigned to artificial intelligence (AI) related tasks. Additionally, the display development project was terminated due to engineering, supplier, and cost issues.
Following last year, this year as well, layoffs are sweeping through the U.S. big tech industry. The day before, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud division, announced plans to lay off hundreds of employees in some departments such as sales, marketing, and offline store technology teams to reduce costs.
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