IBM cuts workers while it hires for cloud computing and Watson initiatives.

IBM confirmed Thursday that its $1 billion “workforce rebalancing” effort is underway, bringing layoffs to company offices worldwide whilst the corporate is spending billions on new business ventures.

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM announced the rebalancing plan in January after reporting lackluster financial results for 2013. The company’s server business, particularly, was hard hit, suffering an 18.7% year-over-year decline in revenue in 2013 while most other segments were either flat or showed only modest gains.

Workers in Burlington, Vt., and Rochester, Minn., were laid off on Thursday, in keeping with Alliance@IBM, a Communications Workers of America union group trying to win collective bargaining rights for IBM employees. The governor of Vermont confirmed the cuts, saying approximately 140 were expected to be laid off. Alliance@IBM has compiled reports of greater than 3,300 layoffs in IBM offices abroad, including 1,500 reportedly let go in Brazil, 600 in Argentina, 480 in France, and 430 in Italy.

[Want more on IBM’s 2013 results? Read IBM Plans Layoffs, New Investments.]

Detailed numbers aren’t yet available on US layoffs, but IBM issued a press release acknowledging that job actions are underway. “IBM continues to rebalance its workforce to satisfy the changing requirements of its clients and to pioneer new, high-value segments of the IT industry,” the corporate stated. “As a consequence, IBM is positioning itself to guide in areas consisting of Cloud, Analytics, and Cognitive Computing and investing in these priority areas.”

IBM pointed to a $1 billion investment in a brand new Watson unit so one can be headquartered in Ny city and a $1.2 billion expansion of its SoftLayer cloud operations. In a cope with the State University of latest York College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, IBM announced on Monday that it’ll keep 3,100 high-tech jobs in upstate The big apple through 2016. In a separate address Long island state, IBM is adding 500 employees at a state-owned technology center in Buffalo.

“At any given time, IBM has greater than 3,000 job openings within the se and other growth areas in the US,” IBM stated.

Workforce rebalancing is an annual practice at IBM. the same $1 billion effort within the second quarter of 2013 eliminated 6,500 to eight,000 positions across IBM’s massive global workforce. IBM had 431,212 employees on the end of 2013, down lower than 1% from a year earlier, however it was the company’s first decline in employment in a decade.

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Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of … View Full Bio

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