Oracle has laid off around 12,000 employees in India, with more job cuts expected within a month as part of a wider restructuring.
The layoffs could be driven by cost-cutting amid heavy spending on AI infrastructure and data centre expansion, which is straining cash flows.
Affected employees are being offered severance including 15 days’ pay per year of service, notice pay, and additional compensation for voluntary exits.
American software giant Oracle has laid off around 12,000 employees in India, with another round of job cuts expected within a month, according to affected employees, as quoted by news agency Press Trust of India.
Globally, Oracle has reportedly let go of around 30,000 workers. The company currently has approximately 30,000 employees in India, including those already impacted by the layoffs.
In an email sent to affected staff, Oracle said that due to "certain organisational changes," a decision had been taken to "streamline operations," and as a result, certain positions would become "redundant".
The company has offered laid-off employees 15 days' salary for each year of service, along with one month of unpaid wages until the termination date, leave encashment, gratuity based on eligibility, and pay for a one-month notice period.
Oracle has also offered an additional two-month salary as a top-up. However, this severance package is only available to those who voluntarily and amicably resign from the company.
Merugu Sridhar, a former Oracle employee, told PTI that he was let go in September after protesting against a 16-hour work shift that the company follows in India.
Sridhar also claimed that Indian employees working at Oracle in the United States had been disproportionately affected. "I contacted my friends and those who are in human resources. They shared that most of the Indians working in the US with the company have been impacted because the local laws there are very strict when it comes to the retrenchment of their citizens," he told PTI.
The layoffs could be part of a broader workforce reduction plan across multiple divisions of the IT giant. Reports earlier this month had suggested the cuts could begin soon and would be larger than Oracle's usual routine trimming of staff.
The primary driver behind the job cuts is Oracle's massive spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. According to a recent Bloomberg report, the company is running short on cash as it funds a historic expansion of data centres, its clients include OpenAI. Last month, Oracle announced plans to raise up to $50 billion this year through a mix of debt and share sales to fund this expansion.
Wall Street analysts, per data compiled by Bloomberg, project that Oracle's cloud division will spend more cash than it generates for the next several years, before investments begin paying off around 2030. In the meantime, the company is looking to cut costs, and its workforce is bearing the brunt.
Oracle's latest round of layoffs comes just a week after Meta began cutting hundreds of employees. Before that, Amazon had announced the elimination of around 16,000 corporate roles, following an earlier round in which it had cut 14,000 employees.
