SUSE is cutting roughly one in ten jobs worldwide, and the CEO named the reason in the internal email himself. "It is obvious that automation and AI are fundamentally changing how software companies work," Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen wrote to the open-source company's roughly 1,900 employees. "That means the organisational setup and cost structure SUSE is built on today will not carry us successfully into the future."
The British outlet The Register reported the email first. Demand for some existing roles has "declined sharply," van Leeuwen continued; the company will accelerate investment in priority areas while deprioritising others. He did not say which roles are going. Affected staff are to be told by Wednesday, employee representatives are named on Thursday, and individual conversations begin early next week. On 16 November the remaining workforce gets a look at the strategy for fiscal 2027.
Volunteers first, then not
None of this came out of nowhere. According to The Register, SUSE had already asked long-serving employees in September whether they would take "voluntary termination of employment." Evidently not enough volunteers came forward, so the involuntary phase follows. Van Leeuwen called the decisions "painful for our employees, our corporate culture and our open-source community."
What is notable is who is doing the cutting. SUSE has stood for enterprise-grade Linux since 1992 — founded by three students in Fürth, now headquartered in Luxembourg, owned by the Swedish private equity firm EQT. In 2023 EQT substantially increased its majority stake and took the company private at a valuation of just under $3 billion. In March this year came reports that EQT was weighing a sale of SUSE Linux at a price of up to $6 billion. Analysts tended to cast SUSE as a beneficiary of the AI boom: the more AI applications enterprises run, the greater the demand for dependable base software.
The awkward part
That is precisely the story the company is now telling against itself. To be traded for years as an infrastructure winner of the AI era and then justify layoffs with AI is the cleanest articulation yet of the suspicion that has hung over the industry for two years: the beneficiary of the narrative is not necessarily the beneficiary of the income statement — and the workforce pays the difference.
For a company whose business rests on long-term maintenance of code and support contracts, that sentence is doubly uncomfortable. "Open-source community" appeared in the email as a specific worry, not a flourish. If automation and AI really do make replaceable those roles whose demand has "declined sharply," this is not only about SUSE: it is a question about whether the support and maintenance market that enterprise Linux lives on is shrinking under its vendors' feet.
SUSE is not an outlier so much as a data point in a series. The difference is the candour of the reasoning. Where most companies cite restructuring, efficiency programmes or "the next phase of growth" — Squarespace did exactly that on the same day with 19 percent — SUSE wrote the technological cause explicitly into a message to every employee.
The practical test arrives on 16 November, when the 2027 strategy is presented. Until then, the only number SUSE has committed to publicly is the one it is subtracting.
