Oracle Cuts 21,000 Jobs As It Embraces AI
7 40Oracle cut roughly 21,000 jobs over the past year as it reorganized around AI and ramps up spending on data centers for customers such as OpenAI and Meta. The restructuring cost the company about $1.8 billion and, while Oracle says AI deployment may drive further reductions, it also warns the cuts could create skills shortages and hurt productivity. The BBC reports: The software and cloud computing firm says it had around 141,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2026, down from about 162,000 workers at the same time last year. The "deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce," the report says. The cuts, which amount to about 13% of Oracle's workforce, are part of a wider trend among tech firms as they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building AI infrastructure like data centers.
7 comments
Makes sense (Score: 5, Insightful)
by CEC-P ( 10248912 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @12:10PM (#66205954)
If you've ever gotten a quote from Oracle for literally anything in the last 20 years, you might suspect as much as I do that there may be some inefficiencies at that dinosaur of a company. I'm sure they'll take this reduction in overhead and use it to lower their prices. They'd never just replace human support with inferior AI to make their overpriced support contracts even shittier then pocket the savings to make the quarterlies look good so stupid Wall Street dinosaurs who don't know how technology works continues to fork over money without seeing past the veil of what's really going on. That's never how big tech works ever.
Re:Makes sense (Score: 5, Interesting)
by CubicleZombie ( 2590497 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @12:32PM (#66206010)
Every project I've worked on for the last decade that involved Oracle, the purpose of the project was to replace Oracle.
Re:Makes sense (Score: 5, Informative)
by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @12:37PM (#66206024)
My Oracle manager pulled down a $40,000 quarterly bonus by billing customers for work that hadn't been done, then I got fired for complaining about getting blamed for the project not being finished when they didn't even tell me about the project until after it was overdue.
Re:Is this a sign to short their stock? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Too Late for Cool ID ( 1794870 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @02:52PM (#66206354)
Years ago, I worked on a project where they were thinking of replacing an Oracle DB. We looked at a few open source databases, both SQL and NoSQL. Although it took longer to initialize, Oracle was much faster. We were disappointed, because NoSQL DBs were much faster for tests with 1000 accesses to the DB, but when you increased it to 1,000,000 accesses, Oracle was always faster.
This was more than 10 years ago, so YMMV
Yepp. Even the Oracle racket ... (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Qbertino ( 265505 ) on <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @12:38PM (#66206026)
... won't be spared. I'm down 20k from my last salary and with AI my productivity has risen 5x. On to of that, the processes I was supposed to automate with code are getting replaced by AI themselves.
Prepare for incoming.
Re: Larry Ellison is a terrible person (Score: 5, Informative)
by Coopjust ( 872796 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @02:26PM (#66206286)
The Ellison family are friends of the administration, hence the Paramount/Skydance merger being allowed through when it's clearly anticompetitive. Oracle gov deals getting trimmed in any meaningful sense was never in the cards.
Oracle is full of shit (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Coopjust ( 872796 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @02:08PM (#66206212)
I love how nowadays whenever you want to "right size" an organization, you can just say the cuts were due to AI, and usually the stock price doesn't react too negatively. Eventually the market sees the true story.
Oracle's stock is now down 14% in the last year as the S&P is 25% higher [yahoo.com]. Same article, free cash flow is -$1.87B, having burned $23.7B USD in the last year. They have $43B in debt and equity and are desperate for more - potentially raising just as much in the next year.
So why the layoffs, really? Beyond "AI layoffs are good and generally don't make the stock decline."
Oracle is heavily overextended in the debt for building the datacenters AI companies use [wsj.com]. Their credit rating is a triple B (still investment grade, but only two steps above junk status). If the AI boom crashes, Oracle is fucked. They're left holding the bag on all the datacenter debt while the AI companies purchase less. Meanwhile, they're already financially strained. So taking the layoffs now creates a major free cash flow. The $1.84B severance payment is peanuts compared to the $8B-$10B in free cash flow it frees up. Of course, the $8B-$10B is not going to cover the huge amounts of debt they have taken on and will continue to take on... and reports I've heard are the layoffs were so wide and blind Oracle is having to hire some of them back.
Expect it to get worse at Oracle, unless somehow instead of LLMs getting progressively barely better for way more spend they magically achieve AGI and humans are displaced from most white collar jobs (not going to happen anytime soon).