the second wave already started and uruguay barely saw the first

between january and march 2026, the global tech sector eliminated more than 73,000 jobs according to layoffs.fyi. just the first quarter. 40% more than the same period in 2025. some of those announcements extended into the start of the second quarter: oracle executed between 20,000 and 30,000 layoffs starting march 31, meta announced 8,000 on april 23 to be executed in may, block had announced 4,000 in february, snap 1,000 on april 15, disney 1,000. accenture had already cut 11,000 since september. tcs announced 12,000 globally in its latest fiscal year, around 2% of its worldwide headcount, although the indian union unite claimed the real figure could reach 30,000.

this is not the post-pandemic crisis of 2022. the companies laying off in 2026 are reporting record revenues. oracle allocated us$ 156 billion to artificial intelligence infrastructure according to td cowen. meta will nearly double its capex to a range of us$ 115-135 billion in 2026, up from us$ 72.2 billion in 2025. sap's cfo, dominik asam, described the annual cuts of 1-2% of headcount as routine, "like brushing your teeth". jack dorsey, when announcing block's 40% cut, said most companies would reach the same conclusion within the next year.

uruguay already saw part of that wave. but only the part that had to arrive first, for specific geographic and contractual reasons. the second part, the structural one, is just beginning.

let's do the tally. since august 2025, multinational companies in the tech and global services sector laid off or announced layoffs adding up to around 1,250 positions in uruguay. alorica 440 (of which 265 were from the verizon contract and the rest from other unassigned projects), ukg 307, sabre between 150 and 200, oracle 70. to this add another 125 from ucm/falck (currently on hold after negotiation with the union) due to administrative centralization in colombia, and a gradual reduction announced by basf that will run until 2028 over a headcount of more than 1,000 people, although these two cases are not strictly part of the tech sector. the direct precedent is pedidosya, which laid off 250 people in january 2024 following the same pattern of regional outsourcing of the contact center.

the local reading, until now, was that these were isolated cases with specific causes. alorica lost verizon. pedidosya outsourced. ukg shut down the entire operation by global corporate decision. sabre adjusted after years of stagnation. oracle executed a global decision. each one with its own story. inside the ministry, that reading was convenient: it allowed the exits to be processed as isolated anomalies, not as a pattern.

they are not isolated anomalies. they are the part of the global pattern that arrived in uruguay first.

what these cases have in common is not a decision made in montevideo. it is a decision made in dallas, in walldorf, in redwood shores, in copenhagen. in each of those cases, the uruguayan operation was a link in a global reallocation chain, and the link was cut when the cheapest link in another country turned out to be even more competitive. alorica closed because verizon moved its operation to chile. sabre cut back because part of its operation is moving to india and poland. falck is centralizing administration in colombia. ukg consolidated in the united states. oracle simply eliminated roles that did not add to the ai business.

that is the first wave. the wave of direct cost arbitrage. uruguay lost those jobs because india, colombia, poland or chile turned out to be cheaper for the same tasks, and because the multinationals finally digested the fact that uruguay's salary advantage from the 2000s has disappeared. the sector's median salary in dollars for 28 representative positions rose from us$ 1,518 in 2022 to us$ 2,033 in 2026, a 34% increase in four years, according to the advice monitor. the central bank's extra-regional competitiveness indicator recorded in january 2026 its lowest value since the year 2000.

the second wave is different. it is not about countries. it is about functions.

when oracle, meta, snap, accenture or block announce cuts of 10%, 16% or 40% of their global headcount and explicitly state that the cause is reallocation toward ai infrastructure, they are not doing geographic arbitrage. they are eliminating entire categories of work because their own ai tools automate them. snap's ceo said that more than 65% of the company's new code is already generated by ai. oracle told its investors that ai-based development tools allow it to operate with smaller headcounts and accelerate deployments. accenture made ai use mandatory as a condition for promotions to leadership positions and established an exit program on a compressed timeline for profiles that cannot be retrained.

that wave has not hit uruguay yet. but it will hit, because the same companies executing those global cuts have operations in uruguay that have so far been spared the scissors.

the map is as follows.

tata consultancy services has more than 2,500 employees in its two montevideo offices. it is the largest global tech operation installed in the country. tcs announced a global cut of 12,261 people in fy 2025-26, around 2% of its worldwide headcount of 613,000. the indian union unite claimed the real figure could reach 30,000 and protested in several cities. the tcs, infosys, wipro and hcltech group reduced more than 42,000 jobs in two years. uruguay, as of april 2026, has had no public layoffs from tcs. but a proportional adjustment of 2% on the local headcount would equal 50 people. of 5%, 125. and the company has no union and no obligation to give advance notice.

accenture operates in uruguay from its argentine regional base, which employs 14,500 people. ceo julie sweet was explicit: "exiting on a compressed timeline people where reskilling is not a viable path for the skills we need". the most exposed uruguayan profiles, functional consulting, testing, application support, are exactly the profiles the parent company is replacing with ai agents.

microsoft uruguay is a small operation, mainly commercial, plus the ai & iot insider lab at latu. the group already laid off more than 15,000 people in 2025, and in april 2026 it opened a voluntary buyout program for around 8,750 employees in the united states, the first in the company's history. the local operation is not at risk by volume, but it is by function: regional sales subsidiaries are exactly what gets consolidated when headquarters centralize global accounts into ai teams that handle entire territories.

ibm has 122 jobs at plaza alemania. the group announced cuts in the "low single digit" range. it is not an existential threat but it is a continuous erosion.

globant already executed its adjustment: an 8% global reduction in 2025, from 31,280 to 28,773 people according to its form 20-f. uruguay is not among the five countries with the most weight in its distribution. but annual attrition rose to 13.6% in 2025 from 9.5% in 2024 and 8.1% in 2023, the stock accumulated a drop close to 55% over the last twelve months, and the 2026 guidance is conservative. the share repurchase program of up to us$ 125 million they announced in october, with us$ 50 million already executed in the fourth quarter of 2025, is literally, in accounting terms, choosing to return capital to the market instead of hiring.

that is the second wave. it is not hypothetical. these are the same companies that, in their subsidiaries in india, poland, the philippines or canada, are already executing what they have not yet executed in uruguay.

and here appears the problem that the local public discussion is not processing. uruguay has spent three months debating whether the state should force companies to give advance notice of mass layoffs. minister castillo is pushing the bill. cuti, loureiro and the private sector reject it. economy minister oddone has internal objections. it is a debate about the first wave. about how to process the exits that already happened. it is a reactive debate.

the second wave will not be solved with advance notices. a thirty or forty-five day notice on a restructuring that reallocates capital from headcount to ai infrastructure changes nothing. the decision was already made on another continent, with a five-year horizon, in a board of directors that does not know and does not care where montevideo is. what uruguay needs to discuss is what it does when tcs, accenture or any of the other multinational hubs decides that the kind of work their uruguayan operations do is already done by a language model at a tenth of the cost.

the institutional response so far is the one uruguay has been giving for two decades: coordination, articulation, dialogue roundtables, reference centers, training plans. the government announced the national artificial intelligence center. uruguay innova is coordinating funds of us$ 30-50 million with the idb. agesic has regulatory sandboxes. ceibal is training teachers in ai. inefop launched digital skills courses. all of that is correct. none of it is going to close the cost gap with india or stop the substitution of junior profiles by code agents.

the problem is not a lack of strategic thinking. the problem is that the kind of strategic thinking uruguay has been doing is designed for a market that no longer exists. it was designed to attract companies looking for reasonably cheap talent in a convenient time zone. in 2026, there is no reasonably cheap talent in uruguay compared with the global alternatives, and the convenient time zone is no longer a differentiator when the work is done by a model that operates 24 hours without a salary.

the question the uruguayan discussion avoids is what happens when public policy learned to manage the entry of companies but never learned to manage the exit. twenty-five years of tax incentives, tax expenditure close to 6% of gdp according to the imf, infrastructure, training subsidies, country branding, trade missions. and no tool for when the company leaves. there is no clawback of benefits. there is no permanence obligation. there is no plan to reabsorb the talent left on the street. there are not even real-time statistics on how many people are being pushed out of the sector each quarter.

the first wave left around 1,250 layoffs concentrated in eight months. the second will be slower, harder to attribute, more distributed. there will be no dramatic announcements with videos from dallas or connecticut. it will be non-hires, vacancies that never open, teams that do not grow, projects executed from bangalore instead of montevideo. it will be, exactly, the dynamic the labor monitor already records: demand that does not grow, junior profiles that cannot find a first job, an entire generational layer trained for a market that closes just as they arrive.

oracle just paid the severance for the first round. on april 10 the cycle closed. nobody in the government said what it will do differently when the next company communicates the next round by video from another country at six in the morning.

the second wave already started. it has not yet hit uruguay head-on.

sources

layoffs.fyi — global tech layoffs tracker https://layoffs.fyi

storyboard18 — global tech layoffs surpass 73,000 in 2026 as ai reshapes workforce https://www.storyboard18.com/trending/global-tech-layoffs-surpass-73000-in-2026-as-ai-reshapes-workforce-ws-l-95567.htm

digit.fyi — tech layoffs jump 40% in q126 as ai fever spikes https://www.digit.fyi/tech-layoffs-jump-40-in-q126-as-ai-fever-spikes/

thenextweb — oracle is cutting up to 30,000 employees to pay for ai data centers https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-layoffs-march-2026

cxtoday — oracle layoffs 2026: 30,000 jobs cut for ai expansion https://www.cxtoday.com/workforce-engagement-management/oracle-layoffs-2026-ai-cx-impact/

bloomberg — meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs in push for efficiency (april 2026) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-23/meta-tells-staff-it-will-cut-10-of-jobs-in-push-for-efficiency

cnn business — meta to cut 10% of staff as it pours billions into ai https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/tech/meta-layoffs-10-percent-staff-ai

cnbc — block laying off about 4000 employees, nearly half of its workforce https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-employees-nearly-half-of-its-workforce.html

sec — block inc form 8-k february 2026 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001512673/000119312526076557/d108590d8k.htm

techcrunch — snap is cutting 1000 jobs, 16% of its workforce https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/snap-is-cutting-1000-jobs-16-of-its-workforce/

cnbc — snap's stock jumps on plans to axe 16% of its workforce citing ai efficiencies https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/snap-stock-layoffs-16-percent-workforce.html

cnbc — accenture plans on 'exiting' staff who can't be reskilled on ai amid restructuring strategy https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/accenture-plans-on-exiting-staff-who-cant-be-reskilled-on-ai.html

fortune — if you want to get promoted, you've got to do the things that we do: accenture ceo on ai adoption https://fortune.com/2026/03/13/accenture-ceo-julie-sweet-ai-adoption-required-promotion-reskilling-layoffs/

cnbc — accenture tells senior staff to use ai tools or risk losing out on leadership promotions https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/accenture-ai-orders-senior-staff-lose-out-promotions.html

storyboard18 — tcs, infosys, wipro and hcl tech headcount reduces by over 42,000 in two years https://www.storyboard18.com/how-it-works/tcs-infosys-wipro-and-hcl-tech-headcount-reduces-by-over-42000-in-two-years-77264.htm

sf chronicle — sap cuts dozens of bay area jobs as part of new layoff strategy https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sap-cuts-dozens-bay-area-193150925.html

heise — "like brushing your teeth": sap plans continuous job cuts https://www.heise.de/en/news/Like-brushing-your-teeth-SAP-plans-continuous-job-cuts-10639836.html

búsqueda — despidos en oracle uruguay dejan casi 70 empleados sin trabajo https://www.busqueda.com.uy/informacion/despidos-oracle-uruguay-dejan-casi-70-empleados-trabajo-medio-una-reestructura-del-negocio-nivel-mundial-n5411745

montevideo portal — el ministro juan castillo dijo que no estaba enterado de los 70 despidos en oracle https://www.montevideo.com.uy/Noticias/El-ministro-Juan-Castillo-dijo-que-no-estaba-enterado-de-los-70-despidos-en-Oracle-uc957707

búsqueda — cierre de ukg en uruguay con despidos inmediatos, poca información y preocupación sindical https://www.busqueda.com.uy/economia/cierre-ukg-uruguay-despidos-inmediatos-poca-informacion-y-preocupacion-sindical-n5406882

teledoce — ukg ratificó la decisión de retirarse de uruguay https://www.teledoce.com/telemundo/nacionales/ukg-ratifico-la-decision-de-retirarse-de-uruguay-ademas-del-despido-la-empresa-pagara-un-plus-y-cursos-a-los-trabajadores-desvinculados/

el observador — alorica cuts 440 jobs in uruguay after verizon ends contract https://nearshoreamericas.com/alorica-cuts-440-jobs-in-uruguay-after-verizon-ends-contract/

el observador — sabre se reestructura con despidos en uruguay https://www.elobservador.com.uy/cafe-y-negocios/sabre-se-reestructura-despidos-uruguay-los-motivos-la-empresa-reducir-su-plantilla-n6034960

el observador — ucm reduce su plantilla en uruguay en medio de un proceso de regionalización de la compañía falck en colombia https://www.elobservador.com.uy/cafe-y-negocios/ucm-reduce-su-plantilla-uruguay-medio-un-proceso-regionalizacion-la-compania-falck-colombia-n6036579

infobae — "no es algo puntual": advierten en uruguay por problemas de competitividad tras despidos masivos https://www.infobae.com/america/america-latina/2026/02/12/no-es-algo-puntual-advierten-en-uruguay-por-problemas-de-competitividad-tras-despidos-masivos-en-multinacional/

prensa mercosur — servicios globales en uruguay: estancamiento laboral y el doble impacto de la ia y el costo país https://prensamercosur.org/2026/03/24/servicios-globales-en-uruguay-estancamiento-laboral-y-el-doble-impacto-de-la-ia-y-el-costo-pais/

ámbito — el fmi plantea que uruguay podría ahorrar 0,4% del pib si ajusta los incentivos de inversión https://www.ambito.com/uruguay/el-fmi-plantea-que-podria-ahorrar-04-del-pib-si-ajusta-los-incentivos-inversion-n6216282

sec — globant s.a. form 6-k share repurchase program (october 2025) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001557860/000110465925095654/tm2527744d1_ex99-1.htm

stocktitan — globant details 2025 risks and client exposure (form 20-f) https://www.stocktitan.net/sec-filings/GLOB/20-f-globant-s-a-files-annual-report-foreign-issuer-1ce604f4b505.html

pedidosya — laid off 250 workers (january 2024), precedent for the pattern https://www.elobservador.com.uy/nota/despidos-en-pedidosya-sorprendieron-al-gobierno-y-mostraron-precarizacion-de-las-apps-20241155049

ámbito — "estamos apuntando errado", cuestiona el sector tecnológico al proyecto para el preaviso de despidos https://www.ambito.com/uruguay/estamos-apuntando-errado-cuestiona-el-sector-tecnologico-al-proyecto-el-preaviso-despidos-n6247718