Samsung Cuts 739 New Jersey Jobs and 100 Texas Jobs as It Moves U.S. Consumer Electronics HQ to Texas

Samsung Electronics America confirmed in a statement to Reuters that 739 roles in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, are affected by the company's plan to move its consumer electronics headquarters to Texas. Most of those workers got relocation offers. Others got termination notices instead.

That New Jersey office isn't some aging outpost Samsung is abandoning. Employees moved into new Englewood Cliffs offices less than a year ago, with U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer attending a ribbon-cutting event marking the opening in September, according to a press release from his office cited by Reuters. SEA employs roughly 1,200 workers in New Jersey. Now a majority of the local workforce is being told to pack up for Texas or find another job.

Texas isn't spared either. At SEA's Plano office, about 100 workers, including staff in the mobile division, have been let go, according to one person told Reuters they were among those laid off. The same relocation that's supposed to consolidate operations in Texas is also cutting jobs at the Texas office itself.

Documents seen by Reuters show SEA notified employees on June 30 of an "enterprise-wide reduction-in-force," citing a "significant number of impacts." LinkedIn posts reviewed by the news agency show more than 30 additional workers, including senior sales and marketing staff in both states and a handful elsewhere, saying they've been let go or left the company in recent weeks. Reuters reports these details had not previously been made public.

Samsung's official line, per its statement, is that the headquarters shift "may lead to changes in our workforce structure, such as employees who are unable to relocate, or certain functions that are optimized to ensure our roles align to key business priorities." That's corporate-speak for: some of you are moving, some of you are gone, and we're not going to spell out exactly how many of each.

Two Businesses, Two Very Different Years

The layoffs aren't happening in a vacuum. Samsung has flagged that it will likely post a 19-fold jump in second-quarter profit, driven by red-hot AI chip demand, according to Reuters. The company also announced plans last month to sink hundreds of billions of dollars into new chip plants.

The consumer electronics side tells a different story. Samsung's mobile division is expected to post its first-ever loss, squeezed by Apple on one end and Chinese competitors like TCL and Hisense on the other in TVs and home appliances, Reuters reported. Rising chip costs tied to the broader AI boom are hitting margins across all of Samsung's consumer electronics products, not just phones.

One division is printing money because of the AI arms race, while the division that actually employs most of these New Jersey and Texas workers is eating losses because of the same AI-driven chip cost spike.

The scale of the total layoffs at SEA hasn't been fully disclosed. Reuters says "the precise extent of the layoffs at SEA could not be learned." Samsung isn't putting a hard number on it publicly, and the sources who spoke to Reuters did so anonymously, citing the sensitivity of the situation.

Not Just Samsung

Samsung's cuts track with a broader pattern among global tech firms trimming consumer-facing and support staff while pouring money into AI infrastructure. Microsoft has made similar moves this year. The pattern is consistent: companies chasing AI chip and data center growth are shedding headcount in the parts of the business that don't touch that boom.

For the workers in Englewood Cliffs who got a relocation offer instead of a pink slip, the decision now is whether uprooting for Texas is worth it. For the roughly 100 in Plano who thought their jobs were safe because they were already in the state Samsung is moving to, the headquarters shift didn't save them.

Samsung hasn't said how many total employees were terminated versus relocated, nor given a timeline for when the Texas headquarters will be fully operational. Reuters' reporting leaves that number unresolved, and neither Samsung nor Gottheimer's office has issued a follow-up statement addressing the layoffs at the same New Jersey site his office celebrated opening less than a year ago.