Parul Manek, Microsoft’s vice-president for Enterprise and Cloud Engineering, spoke at the company’s 30th anniversary in Romania. Economica.net published her remarks on Sunday, 18 October 2026. Her point was that an advantage in the artificial-intelligence era does not come only from consuming technology made elsewhere, but from creating it. “Romania has an important role to play in this future,” Manek said.

Microsoft opened its first local office in 1996. It has about 2,000 staff in Bucharest, Iași and Timișoara, of whom some 900 are engineers. The same figures appear in a Microsoft Source EMEA note from September, when Gabriela Popescu, the country manager for Romania, Moldova and the CIS, called for faster AI adoption. In the second quarter of 2026, 18% of Romania’s working-age population used generative AI, against more than 30% in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Manek described Romanian teams as working on cloud, enterprise technology and sovereign cloud. Not only support, she said: they help set strategy in Europe. She used the word trust: investment grew because delivery held. She did not announce a new campus and she gave no hiring timetable.

Economica.net, citing Microsoft Romania’s filing on the Termene platform, says 2025 turnover rose 15% to 894.95 million lei, a record for the subsidiary. The loss deepened for a third year, to 55.37 million lei, 29% more than in 2024. Those are accounts, not a prompt to invest.

Popescu had said, also at the anniversary, that she expected to pass 2,000 staff “next year”, but that the skill mix is changing. Local engineers registered 35 patents in 2025. Microsoft was, for a sixth year, the most desired employer in the Catalyst Solutions survey. That is not a stock call either.

Sunday’s news is Manek’s speech, not a sovereign-cloud contract signed with the Romanian state. Romania remains an engineering hub for the group. The profit-and-loss figures show a subsidiary that sells more and still loses money. Both can be true without turning into investment advice.

Image: PosifCool, Sky Tower from Herastrau Lake, Bucharest, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons; an archive office tower, not a Microsoft campus in October 2026.

Sources consulted: In the AI era, Microsoft bets on Romanian engineers - Economica.net; 30 years of Microsoft in Romania - Microsoft Source EMEA.