Oracle, the American software giant best known for powering the databases of large corporations and governments, is preparing to lay off thousands of employees across multiple divisions.
The cuts could begin as early as this month and are expected to be broader than the company's usual rounds of routine job trimming.
The reason why the firm has chosen to reduce jobs is related to AI spending. Oracle is spending an enormous amount of money building AI infrastructure, and it is running short on cash as a result, according to a Bloomberg report.
2 March 2026
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Oracle is in the middle of a historic expansion of data centres, and its clients include OpenAI. To fund this expansion, Oracle announced last month that it would raise up to $50 billion this year through a mix of debt and share sales. That is a staggering sum, and it comes with consequences.
Wall Street analysts projected that Oracle's cloud division will burn through more cash than it generates for the next several years, before the investment starts paying off around 2030, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the meantime, the company needs to trim costs wherever it can, and its workforce is in the crosshairs.
Following this move, the question of whether AI will replace some of these workers arises, and in a part, maybe it will.
It is to be noted that some of these layoffs are specifically targeted at job categories that the company believes it will need fewer people for, precisely because AI can now do that work, the report added.
In other words, the same technology Oracle is spending billions to build is also being used to justify cutting the people who helped build it.
The company has also quietly begun freezing or slowing down hiring in its cloud division, with an internal review of open job listings launched this week.
Oracle employed around 162,000 people globally as of May 2025, making it one of the largest technology employers in the world. The scale of the planned cuts has not been officially confirmed, but the Bloomberg report described them as wider-reaching than a typical round of layoffs.
Notably, the AI spending boom is squeezing budgets across the entire tech industry, forcing companies to lay off staff in one hand while pouring money into data centres with the other.
Microsoft laid off around 15,000 employees last year, even as it ramped up investment in AI and cloud infrastructure. More recently, Block, the payments and technology company founded by Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey, announced it would cut 4,000 of its 10,000 employees.
The pattern is becoming familiar, big tech companies are essentially funding the AI revolution by cutting the workforce of the pre-AI era.
