Qualcomm has begun laying off employees at its Bengaluru and Hyderabad offices and is offering an additional month’s salary to those who sign their separation documents within three days of receiving them.
The U.S. chipmaker’s India exercise began on 9 November 2026 and could put more than 1,000 jobs at risk, according to multiple reports citing people familiar with the matter. Affected employees have reportedly been offered severance equivalent to three months’ salary, additional compensation tied to their length of service, and an extra month’s pay for signing their exit documents within the three-day window.
The first round has largely affected senior engineers and employees with multiple years of experience at the company. The exercise is expected to extend to Qualcomm’s engineering and research facilities in Delhi-NCR and Chennai in the coming days. Qualcomm has not publicly confirmed the severance arrangements, the total number of affected roles, or the India scale of the restructuring.
The India cuts follow a global workforce reduction that Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon outlined in an internal memo on 20 October 2026. Amon described the exercise as a “performance-focused reduction” intended to build “a stronger performance culture” and address situations where the company “has consistently fallen short of expectations.”
India is Qualcomm’s largest engineering base outside the United States, with chip design, embedded software, 5G and AI teams spread across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR and Chennai. The country accounts for around 20,000 of the company’s global workforce. Moneycontrol estimated that the cuts could affect 5% to 6% of that India base, though the figure has not been independently confirmed by the company.
The layoffs land amid broader workforce reductions across the global semiconductor industry. Intel, Micron Technology and Broadcom have each announced restructuring exercises in 2026 as chipmakers reassess headcount while shifting investment toward artificial intelligence, data-centre semiconductors and automotive technology.
On the India IT services side, Cognizant’s “Project Leap” restructuring is reported to put between 12,000 and 15,000 global jobs at risk, with the bulk of the impact landing on India operations. Qualcomm is also reviewing its U.S. workforce, with layoff notifications expected to be filed in California under the state’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.
