(Yicai) May 16 -- The relocation of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence team from China to other countries will not impact the US tech giant’s operations in the country, according to an insider.

Most of the employees affected by the relocation have the option to move to other positions at Microsoft, an insider told Yicai.

Around 100 employees at Microsoft’s China business, including some working for AI teams such as Azure Machine Learning, received emails from the company asking whether they are willing to relocate to countries such as the United States, Australia, and Ireland, according to online information posted by social media users yesterday. Microsoft, which offered to take care of visas, asked the staff to reply by June 7.

Yicai contacted one of the users who released the information online. The person said one of their family member working for Microsoft’s AI business received an email claiming their team would be relocated to Ireland, and members are not required to go if they do not wish to.

According to other information circulating online, the machine learning teams of Microsoft’s cloud and AI businesses in China will be relocated to Seattle, and those working on cloud computing platform Azure will move to Australia. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Developer Division will remain in China.

Last year, Microsoft’s Azure was the third-largest cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service platform in the Asia-Pacific region, with a market share of 16.1 percent, according to the latest data from US consulting firm Gartner. Alibaba Cloud ranked first with a 22.2 percent market share, followed by Amazon Web at 16.5 percent. 

Editor: Futura Costaglione