SUSE Reportedly Cuts About 10% of Its Staff, Citing 'Automation and AI'

SUSE, the Linux company owned by EQT, is laying off one in ten employees after its CEO told staff that AI has shrunk the need for some roles, according to The Register.

By The Denominator’s arithmetic, one in ten of SUSE’s more than 1,900 employees is about 190 people. Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, the CEO, says the company’s org chart and cost base no longer fit software work done with AI tools. Any software company can hold its own reporting layers and role mix up against that claim.

What did the CEO tell staff?

Van Leeuwen wrote that “automation and AI are fundamentally shifting how software companies operate.” Tooling is already changing daily work, he said, so teams move faster with less operational overhead and flatter reporting lines. The requirement for some roles “has greatly diminished,” and SUSE’s cost base “will not carry us forward.”

He added that other roles will evolve over the next few years. He called the decisions painful for SUSE’s people, its culture and its open source community.

What is still open?

The memo named no roles or countries and gave no measure of the productivity gain behind the cuts: which tools, on which tasks, saving how much time. SUSE also has not said how many people took the voluntary separation and early retirement offer it made to eligible staff in September, when a SUSE representative said no target had been set for departures.

The memo set the order: affected staff hear first, staff representatives are nominated the next day, and one-to-one meetings begin the week of Nov. 9.

What does SUSE sell?

Enterprise Linux, container management and storage, and edge software. Its latest product announcements add agentic AI capabilities for managing Linux systems.

SUSE’s remaining staff see its fiscal 2027 strategy on Nov. 16.