Microsoft is asking some of its China-based employees to consider transferring outside the country, the company said on Thursday, as relations between U.S. and China grow increasingly strained over technologies like artificial intelligence and semiconductors.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, said
Microsoft is asking about 700 to 800 people who are involved in machine
learning and other work related to cloud computing to consider relocating.
"Providing internal opportunities is a regular part of
managing our global business. As part of this process, we shared an optional
internal transfer opportunity with a subset of employees," a Microsoft
spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement, without specifying the
number of employees it sent the request to.
Microsoft remains committed to China and will continue to
operate there and other markets, the spokesperson said.
The employees, mostly engineers of Chinese nationality, were
earlier in the week offered an option to transfer to the U.S., Ireland,
Australia, and New Zealand, WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the
matter.
The move comes amid spiralling Sino-U.S. relations as
President Joe Biden's administration hiked tariffs on various Chinese imports
including electric vehicle (EV) batteries, computer chips, and medical
products.
Reuters reported earlier this month that the U.S. Commerce
Department is considering a new regulatory push to restrict the export of
proprietary or closed-source AI models, whose software and the data it is
trained on are kept under wraps.