IBM to lay off workers in NC, providing a peek at company-wide job cuts
In a letter Tuesday, IBM informed the North Carolina Department of Commerce it was laying off 72 employees at a Winston-Salem office, with most working as process delivery specialists.
Employers are required to file WARN Notices to the state at least 60 days before closing a facility that affects 50 or more workers. IBM’s U.S. human resources director Lawrence Sposato in the letter stated the first layoffs will become official on May 30.
This WARN Notice, which the state provided to The News & Observer, contains some of the only local insights into IBM’s recent round of layoffs, which many company employees internally refer to as resource actions, or “RAs”.
IBM has declined to share how many workers may have lost their jobs at its Research Triangle Park campus, where IBM has had one of the area’s oldest and largest presences, dating to the 1960s.
But position cuts have been made company-wide. During a January earnings call, IBM announced it would implement a “workforce rebalancing” this year, similar to the one it made in 2024 that affected a low single-digits percentage of global staff.
“This rebalancing is driven by increases in productivity and our continued push to align our workforce with the skills most in-demand among our clients,” IBM spokesperson Sarah Minkel said in an email last week. “Especially in areas such as AI and hybrid cloud.”
The N&O reported IBM’s “RAs” in 2024 impacted at least some Triangle-area workers.
Mass layoff reports at IBM
The New York-based company entered 2025 with 270,300 employees, including at subsidiaries like the Raleigh software provider Red Hat, which represented a 4% decrease from the previous year.
IBM declined to say how many workers it employs in the Triangle area. According to state commerce data, it has gone from Durham County’s No. 2 largest employer in 2016 to No. 7 as of last summer. In December 2023, the company sold a four-building campus just outside RTP for $66 million, where it then began to lease.
According to the news outlet The Register, IBM plans to cut thousands of U.S. positions this year, with a portion of the jobs moving to India. The company has not confirmed this report.
Last week, dozens of IBM layoff postings began appearing on the anonymous messaging website TheLayoff.com, at least three of which purported to be from impacted workers at the company’s Research Triangle Park offices.
This story was originally published March 26, 2025 at 5:00 PM.
