AI Is Already Writing About 30% of Code at Microsoft and Google. Here's What It Means for Software Engineers. Big Tech is spending tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- Big tech companies, from Meta to Microsoft, are using AI to write and review code.
- At Meta’s LlamaCon conference this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that AI will take over half of the company’s software development within the next year.
- About 30% of new code at Google and Microsoft is AI-generated.
Big Tech is spending tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure in 2025 alone, and now the CEOs of companies like Meta and Microsoft are indicating exactly how they're using the technology.
At Microsoft, engineers are using AI to write 20% to 30% of the code for company projects, CEO Satya Nadella said at Meta's LlamaCon conference on Tuesday.
In a sit-down chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nadella noted that the exact percentage of code produced by AI varies based on the programming language. He said that AI generates "fantastic" Python code, but its C++ abilities are "not that great."
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Nadella also said that Microsoft is leaning on more advanced AI agents, software programs that perform complex tasks without human assistance, to review code.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Photo by Stephen Brashear/Getty Images
As for Meta, Zuckerberg said in the talk that he isn't sure exactly how much code AI is currently writing, but the company intends to use AI for half of its software development within the next year.
"That will just kind of increase from there," Zuckerberg said.
On a podcast with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg stated that Meta is developing AI that can write code at the level of a mid-level engineer, and the company plans to have "a lot" of its code "built by AI engineers instead of people engineers" this year.
At Google, meanwhile, CEO Sundar Pichai said on an earnings call last week that the company was using AI to write "well over 30%" of new code, up from 25% in October. Google employees are increasingly accepting AI-suggested code, he said.
"I still see it as early days, and there's going to be a lot more to do," Pichai said on the earnings call.
Other C-suite executives have predicted that AI will soon take over coding. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said on the 20VC podcast last month that AI will write 95% of code within the next five years. Dario Amodei, the CEO of $61 billion AI startup Anthropic, had an even more accelerated timeline, stating last month that AI would write "essentially all of the code" for companies within the next year.
Earlier this week, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said that the company would replace human contract workers with AI.
This month, Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke told all of his employees that using AI effectively was now a "fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify."
As tech companies turn to AI for coding, they are laying off human software engineers. According to layoff-tracker Layoffs.fyi, over 51,000 tech employees have been laid off at 112 companies so far this year.
