By Rich Duprey
Publication Date: 2026-08-08 15:38:00
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The AI boom has created a strange split-screen economy. Companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on chips, data centers, and software while simultaneously shrinking the workforces that once powered the technology industry. The promised payoff is higher productivity, but the immediate result is becoming harder to ignore: fewer people are needed to produce more.
That tension is showing up in the labor data. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), the information sector’s layoff rate jumped 0.7 percentage point in June to 2.3% — meaning roughly 2.3% of workers were laid off or discharged during the month. The rate has more than doubled since November, as 63,000 workers were let go in June, the third-highest monthly total since April 2020.
Tech Layoffs Are Accelerating
The six-month moving average layoff rate climbed to 2.0%, its second-highest reading on…