Developer Platform GitLab announced on a conference call on Tuesday, as part of a broad restructuring plan announced last month, that the company will lay off approximately 14% (about 350 employees) and exit 22 countries, aiming to streamline management levels and reallocate resources to fully accelerate investment in core infrastructure to cope with the explosive traffic brought by AI workflows.

GitLab's CEO Bill Staples noted that AI agents operating at machine scale are pushing traditional infrastructure to its limits, with submission pressure far exceeding design limits. To address this, GitLab has launched an intergenerational rearchitecture of Git this quarter to support the scale needed for 100x growth.

The company has partnered with an unnamed AI lab to rebuild APIs optimized for agents, used for storing and retrieving context information such as code, while also increasing investment in AI orchestration tools, context layers, and governance tools. Despite architectural pressures, GitLab's first-quarter financial performance remained strong, with revenue reaching $264 million, a 23% increase year-over-year, and a gross margin of 88%. The restructuring is expected to cost between $30 million and $35 million.

It is now common for tech giants, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, to reduce staff due to their transition toward AI-centric businesses. This trend reflects a fundamental shift in the R&D paradigm in the AI era: from relying on "human scale" to pursuing "machine scale." GitLab's restructuring is not only a self-rescue to overcome technical bottlenecks but also signals a new round of technological reshuffling in global developer infrastructure, adapting to the age of agents.