Oracle plans thousands of job cuts as AI data center spending pushes cash flow negative

Oracle Plans Thousands of Job Cuts in Face of AI Cash Crunch

Oracle Corp. is planning to ax thousands of jobs, among its moves to handle a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort. The job reductions will affect divisions across the company and may be implemented as soon as this month, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing the still-private plans. Some of the cuts will be aimed at job categories that the company expects it will need less of due to AI, two of the people said. Led by Chairman Larry Ellison, Oracle is embarking on a historic build-out of data centers to power AI workloads for customers such as OpenAI. The company, long known for its database software, has been making a transition the past few years to bulk up its cloud computing unit with a focus on AI, intending to become a viable competitor to market leaders Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Wall Street projects the expenditures by the cloud unit for data centers to push Oracle's cash flow negative over the coming years before the spending begins to pay off in 2030, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Last month, Oracle said it would raise as much as $50 billion this year through a combination of debt and equity sales. The reductions being planned are expected to be wider-reaching than the company's typical rolling job cuts, according to the people. This week, Oracle announced internally that it would be reviewing many of the open job listings in its cloud division, effectively slowing down or freezing the hiring process, according to people with knowledge of the move. Oracle declined to comment. The company had about 162,000 employees globally as of the end of May 2025. Planning for the workforce reductions is still active and could change, the people said. Oracle's initial moves as an AI cloud provider drew favor from investors, who boosted the stock 61% in 2024 and 20% last year. However, as the costs increased, the market has soured on the company, with the shares falling 54% from their September 2025 high through Wednesday's close. After the report, the stock on Thursday gave back earlier gains, declining as much as 1.5% to $150.12. The high up-front costs of AI have fueled cuts across the tech industry as companies work to balance their budgets. Microsoft fired some 15,000 people last year amid rising spending on data centers and AI software development. Last week Block Inc. announced that it would lay off nearly half of its staff, with co-founder Jack Dorsey citing the efficiency-boosting power of AI. In September, Oracle disclosed in a filing that it was planning its largest-ever restructuring, which will cost as much as $1.6 billion in the current fiscal year ending in May, including severance checks to exiting employees. That was significantly larger than any other similar plan Oracle has disclosed. The company is scheduled to announce its fiscal third-quarter earnings on Tuesday.

Oracle plans thousands of job cuts as data center costs rise, Bloomberg News reports

March 5 (Reuters) - Enterprise software company Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab is planning thousands of job cuts as it faces a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday. Long a smaller contender in the cloud market, over the past year Oracle has emerged as a major player in the business of renting computing power thanks, in part, to its $300 billion deal with OpenAI. But investors have grown worried about how it would fund the data center expansion needed to serve OpenAI and ⁠other customers, including Elon Musk's xAI and Meta (META.O), opens new tab. In December, the company said it expects capital expenditures for fiscal 2026 to be $15 billion higher than the $35 billion figure the company estimated during its first-quarter earnings call. The layoffs will impact divisions across Oracle and may be implemented as soon as this month, the Bloomberg report said, citing people familiar with the matter. Some cuts will be aimed at job categories that the company expects will shrink due to AI. The planned reductions are expected to be wider-reaching than ⁠Oracle's typical rolling job cuts, according to Bloomberg. This week, Oracle announced internally that it would be reviewing many of the open job listings in its cloud division, effectively slowing down or freezing the hiring process, the report added. Oracle declined to comment when contacted by Reuters. The ⁠company had about 162,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2025, according to its annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The software company, chaired by billionaire Larry Ellison, in ⁠February outlined plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion this year in order to expand its cloud infrastructure, fueling investor concerns about its rising debt load. Oracle will report third-quarter ⁠results on Tuesday. Its shares fell more than 15% last year, with its December results showing about $10 billion in cash burn for the first half of the fiscal year. Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Alan Barona Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Oracle prepares new round of layoffs while doubling down on AI infrastructure

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. What we know so far: Oracle is preparing for another wave of job cuts as part of a major restructuring plan, even as it ramps up investment in artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure. The company has added $500 million to its restructuring budget for the fiscal year, bringing the total to $2.1 billion - a move analysts say signals that thousands more positions could be eliminated in the coming months. The expanded fund, disclosed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission following Oracle's quarterly earnings report, has heightened concerns that the company's restructuring will carry a significant human cost. Oracle has spent roughly $982 million of the budget so far, largely on severance, leaving about $1.1 billion in restructuring funds before the fiscal year ends on May 31. RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria said the move suggests the restructuring - which is often a euphemism for layoffs - could be broader than earlier this fiscal year. Oracle's first round of job cuts last year affected more than 3,000 employees across the US, Canada, and India, eliminating much of its middle-management layer in sales and marketing. The remaining funds could easily support another round of comparable size, according to people familiar with the company's operations. Although Oracle has not formally announced new layoffs, internal signals have left employees unsettled. At a packed all-hands meeting in Nashville - soon to become the company's new global headquarters - co-chief executives Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia struck an upbeat tone about quarterly performance and the benefits of the relocation. However, attendees reported that both leaders emphasized how AI coding tools can automate many programming tasks and accelerate product mock-ups, echoing Oracle's message to investors that the technology allows it to build more software in less time with fewer people. That emphasis left teams in legacy support and non-core operations concerned that layoffs could be imminent. Analysts at TD Cowen have previously reported that Oracle is exploring plans to cut as many as 30,000 jobs and sell non-core business units as part of a broader effort to fund its AI expansion. Meanwhile, the company is racing to build facilities capable of handling massive GPU-based workloads for clients such as OpenAI. Constructing and maintaining these centers requires billions in capital and new borrowing, costs that investors are watching closely.

Oracle Will Downsize Its Product Teams Because Of AI

In a third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, tech giant Oracle announced quarterly revenue growth above expectations and an increased sales outlook for the next fiscal year, along with a downsizing of some of its teams. The stated reason why, as has become somewhat customary in Silicon Valley at this point, was artificial intelligence. "AI models for generating computer code have become so efficient that we have been restructuring our product development teams into smaller, more agile and productive groups," the company shared in the press release. "This new AI Code Generation technology is enabling us to build more software in less time with fewer people." Oracle's stock has been battered recently, tanking more than 50% since a September peak that happened following the announcement of more data center plans with OpenAI under Stargate. Although Oracle shares once hit highs so grand on the coattails of the AI trade that it briefly turned its chairman Larry Ellison into the richest man on Earth, the culprit driving the drop is also artificial intelligence. Wall Street fears the impact AI will have on Oracle, whichever way demand for the technology may grow. One aspect of that is the billions upon billions of dollars Oracle is committing to a major data center buildout. Just this fiscal year, the company is looking to spend $50 billion, roughly double what it spent a year earlier. But with delays hitting some of these data center projects and the company's increased reliance on debt markets, experts grew uneasy about Oracle's ability to live up to its hefty commitments. Meanwhile, the financial commitments have turned the company's free cash flow negative. This past quarter, free cash flow sank to negative $24,736. Experts predict it will stay negative until 2030. In a crunch for cash, company executives have begun planning thousands of job cuts across the company, starting as early as this month, according to a Bloomberg report from last week, including effectively freezing hiring in its cloud division. Oracle is a bellwether for market confidence in AI, and the free cash flow question quickly infected other major players in the industry. AI hyperscalers Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft all reported eyewatering capex figures in earnings reports last month, sparking a fear that the spending is accelerating rapidly while actual returns from AI adoption fail to materialize. Those fears added to the growing AI bubble discussion, even pushing Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to spend a good chunk of his company's earnings call assuring investors that the hyperscalers (who are also incidentally Nvidia's top customers) will see cash flow growing as more spending translates to revenue. Oracle's earnings beat, along with improved sales guidance for 2027, are important for convincing investors that demand for AI will continue to outpace supply. That, combined with the assurance that AI is raising productivity in the company, could help Oracle quell some of those fears around the future of both the company and the AI trade. The other side of the AI impact coin is if AI becomes too powerful and makes software companies obsolete, in a feared "SaaSpocalypse." Last month, on the heels of Anthropic's Claude Cowork release and a Substack scenario outlining this possibility, investors began selling software provider stocks in a frenzy. Oracle was one of the software stocks impacted, but executives took to the earnings call on Tuesday to convince investors that their company was an exception. "The use of AI-coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly. We are building brand-new SaaS products using AI and also embedding AI agents right into our existing applications and suites," co-CEO Mike Sicilia told investors. "Yes, some smaller or single-focus SaaS players may well be disrupted, but Oracle will not be among them." With regard to either story, investors may have been satisfied enough for now with Oracle's response on Tuesday, as the stock rose more than 8% following the release.

Oracle is spending billions on AI data centers as cash flow turns negative

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Connecting the dots: Will Oracle be the first major company to falter amid the looming AI bubble? Analysts are scrambling to interpret what is really happening at the cloud giant, as co-founder Larry Ellison emphasizes that AI coding tools are actually strengthening Oracle's SaaS business. Despite operating in a different league than traditional Big Tech giants, Oracle has heavily invested in the AI-driven future of computing and cloud services. The Austin-based company has committed billions to build massive data centers, but recent rumors suggest that this ambitious strategy could be at risk, signaling potential trouble rather than a new golden era for the enterprise SaaS leader. According to unnamed sources familiar with the matter, OpenAI has reportedly decided to halt its planned expansion of the Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas. The AI startup had partnered with Oracle, which is still investing heavily in building the facility and installing hardware. Initial plans called for even larger and more powerful centers to support what was described as the "unlimited" demand for chatbot workloads. The sources claim that OpenAI's decision stems from the Abilene site's reliance on Blackwell-based AI accelerators. Nvidia recently introduced the Vera Rubin architecture, which can allegedly train models up to five times faster and reduce inference costs by a factor of 10. OpenAI is now expected to secure access to Vera Rubin accelerators, leaving Oracle tied to a slower Blackwell-based facility. This shift could create a major challenge for Oracle, as OpenAI seeks higher performance at lower costs, potentially threatening the company's long-term investments in AI infrastructure. For a debt-laden database giant, the timing could not be more critical. The market has long questioned the sustainability of Oracle's AI spending. The company has reportedly committed $100 billion to build and expand its new hyperscale infrastructure, much of it financed through debt. Unlike Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, Oracle lacks similarly massive revenue streams to fund what some critics call the AI data center "fantasy." Oracle's cash flow has turned negative, as the company has already spent more than it has earned from its enterprise-focused business. Sources say the company is also planning to lay off thousands of employees, accelerating its transformation from a traditional software licensing firm into a cloud infrastructure provider for large-scale AI operations. Oracle claims that AI technologies and "vibe coding" tools are making development teams smaller, more agile, and more productive. The company highlighted this efficiency while reporting strong quarterly results that exceeded Wall Street expectations. Overall revenue increased 22% in the third quarter, with cloud revenues up 44% year-over-year. The company now expects to close the fiscal year with $90 billion in revenue, above analysts' forecasts of $86.6 billion. Co-founder Larry Ellison emphasized that vibe coding is helping Oracle build a complete ecosystem from scratch, suggesting that fears of a "SaaS apocalypse" will not impact the company. Yet despite the upbeat statements, Oracle's negative free cash flow for the past 12 months reached $13.18 billion, indicating that the Austin-based giant is still burning cash even as it touts its AI-driven efficiencies.

Oracle Axing Huge Number of Jobs as AI Crisis Intensifies

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech AI companies are spending vast sums of money on data centers -- infrastructure expenditures that come with some hair-raising price tags. As Bloomberg reported last week, Larry Ellison's Oracle may have spread itself a little too thin. The company is planning to cut thousands of jobs due to a "cash crunch" resulting from a massive AI data center expansion effort. Inside sources told the outlet that at least some of the cut jobs will affect categories that will no longer be needed due to AI. Even job listings in its cloud division are reportedly being reviewed, indicating a serious downscaling effort. A day after the story was published, Bloomberg subsequently reported that the company had ended its plans to expand its flagship AI data center in Abilene, Texas, after "negotiations dragged over financing" and its project partner OpenAI changed its mind on the matter. The data center is part of president Donald Trump's flagging $500 billion Stargate project, which was announced just weeks into his presidency early last year. Oracle has since denied the reporting in a statement to Investing.com, stating that the facility is still on track and that OpenAI is still committed to the data center expansion. The reported job cuts, however, didn't appear to warrant a reaction. The drama highlights how even some of the most valuable companies in the world are struggling to keep up with enormous plans to meet the intense computing, electricity, and water demands of increasingly powerful AI models. That's despite investors being painfully aware that a return on their investments could be many years out. Oracle isn't expected to go cash flow positive until at least 2030, Bloomberg found in its analysis. Meanwhile, tech giants are continuing to accrue massive amounts of debt to fund their data center build-outs, raising major red flags on Wall Street. Oracle announced in February that it's looking to add up to $50 billion in debt and equity sales this year alone. As the crisis deepened, Oracle's shares tanked, falling over 50 percent since their September 2025 high -- triggered by the announcement of the company's largest-ever restructuring -- as of last week. Shares are down almost five percent over the last month. Oracle's woes challenge the industry's persistent narrative that AI is replacing white-collar jobs. Instead, as Quartz points out, many companies like Oracle are simply responding to more financially pressing matters -- such as their massive investments in AI triggering a cash crunch. A reminiscent story is playing out at Jack Dorsey's Block. The Twitter founder recently announced he was axing almost half of the staff at his fintech company, citing recent advancements in AI. However, former staffers have since stepped forward, arguing Block was responding to overhiring during the pandemic and cutting corporate bloat instead. Oracle will announce its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday and is largely expected to meet Wall Street expectations. But given the drama over its data center expansion in Texas, cracks are starting to show as it continues to pour billions into AI.

Oracle is the latest tech company slashing jobs over AI

Much like its peers in the tech industry, Oracle is pouring money into AI infrastructure. The tech giant inked a lucrative $300 billion deal with OpenAI last year to build out AI data centers, in a bid to compete with companies like Amazon and Microsoft. But the deal requires Oracle to spend a significant amount of money upfront -- a move that is now pushing the company to cull its workforce. According to recent reports, Oracle is planning major layoffs that would reportedly affect thousands of jobs. The company had already earmarked about $1.6 billion for restructuring costs this year -- largely due to "employee severance costs" -- indicating there would be job cuts. As of February, that sum has now increased by $500 million, bringing overall restructuring costs to $2.1 billion. Bloomberg has reported that the layoffs would impact many parts of the business and could take effect this month; some of the job losses will also target roles that AI is rendering less essential. The forthcoming job cuts were framed as broader than Oracle's usual rolling approach to layoffs; the company typically avoids large-scale layoffs that merit a public announcement. Oracle would also effectively freeze hiring in its cloud division, according to Bloomberg. Oracle joins a growing list of companies that are trimming headcount due to AI -- but as with many other employers, there's limited evidence that the company is replacing workers with AI en masse. Instead, these layoffs largely seem to be driven by Oracle's extensive investments in AI, which could take years to pay off. Oracle is currently raising $50 billion in debt and equity to finance its AI aspirations, and analysts have said the company will likely continue losing money on this venture until 2030.

Oracle prepares for layoffs, sets aside $2.1 billion for restructuring - The Economic Times

Oracle is preparing more job cuts as it increases reliance on artificial intelligence and funds expensive AI data centres, the Financial Times reported. The company has raised restructuring funds to $2.1 billion. Oracle earlier cut over 3,000 roles and may reduce thousands more as AI tools improve efficiency.Oracle is preparing for another round of job cuts in the coming months as it leans more heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) to improve efficiency while preserving cash for its expanding data-centre strategy, according to a report by the Financial Times. The database company founded by Larry Ellison has set aside an additional $500 million to cover restructuring costs, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Wednesday. The extra allocation raises Oracle's restructuring funds to $2.1 billion for the current fiscal year, significantly higher than in previous years and potentially enough to support thousands of job reductions. The development comes shortly after Oracle reported stronger-than-expected results for its fiscal third quarter. The company posted revenues of $17.2 billion, up 22% from a year earlier, beating Wall Street expectations. It has also projected sales of about $90 billion in its next fiscal year. Despite the strong performance, the Financial Times reported that Oracle faces investor pressure over its aggressive spending on large-scale AI data centres. Building and expanding these facilities has required the company to significantly increase borrowing. So far, Oracle has used around $982 million of the restructuring funds, largely to cover severance costs. That leaves roughly $1.1 billion available for additional workforce reductions before the end of the company's fiscal year on May 31. Oracle has also indicated that advances in AI-driven coding tools could reduce the number of developers it needs. In its earnings statement, Oracle told investors that AI technologies are enabling teams to build "more software in less time with fewer people." Oracle had already cut more than 3,000 jobs across the United States, Canada, and India between August and September. According to the report, this removed what it described as a "whole middle management layer in sales and marketing." With more restructuring funds still available, the company could reduce a similar or even larger number of roles in the coming months. Bloomberg reported last week that further layoffs were expected. Oracle had about 162,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2025, according to its annual filing with the SEC.

Oracle Boosts Restructuring Budget To $2.1 Billion Amid AI Growth

The vendor previously allocated about $1.6 billion for the restructuring plan. The Oracle layoffs expected to hit during this fiscal year might be bigger than initially thought, with the vendor now disclosing an extra $500 million to its 2026 restructuring plan, bringing the costs up to $2.1 billion. The vendor previously allocated about $1.6 billion for the restructuring plan and has already recorded $156 million in restructuring expenses for the quarter ended Feb. 28 and $982 million for the three quarters ended Feb. 28, according to a regulatory filing Wednesday. Feb. 28 marked the end of the third quarter of Oracle's 2026 fiscal year. "Any changes to the estimates of executing the 2026 Restructuring Plan will be reflected in our future results of operations," according to the filing. [RELATED: Oracle Q3 Earnings: 'SaaSpocalypse' Is Coming -- Just Not For Oracle, Executives Say] CRN has reached out to Oracle for comment. Oracle's NetSuite division is part of CRN's 2026 Partner Program Guide. Reports have emerged this month that the Austin, Texas-based database and cloud products giant plans to cut thousands of jobs to help fund its artificial intelligence data center expansion. Multiple news outlets have reported on an estimate of as much as 30,000 Oracle job cuts by investment bank TD Cowen. Oracle last reported an employee count of about 162,000 in May 2025. About 31 percent of those employees were in research and development, 23 percent were in services, 19 percent were in sales and marketing, and 18 percent were in cloud services and license support operations, according to regulatory filings. So far, about 36 percent of the costs associated with the restructuring have come from the cloud and software segment. About 13 percent of the costs have hit the services segment and about 4 percent have hit the hardware division, according to Oracle's latest filing on the restructuring plan. About half was categorized as "other," defined by Oracle as "employee severance costs not related to our operating segments and certain other restructuring plan costs." For the entire $2.1 billion total restructuring costs, once all is said and done, about 37 percent should hit cloud and software and about 19 percent should hit services. About 4 percent will come from the hardware segment. About 40 percent will hit the "other" category. During Oracle's latest quarterly earnings call Tuesday, company executives said they are increasingly embracing AI tools internally to revolutionize product development. Larry Ellison, the company's chief technology officer who co-founded Oracle in 1977, said on the call that Oracle coding tools allow it to build a comprehensive set of agents for automating entire health care and financial services ecosystems. Ellison and Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia dismissed concerns around a "SaaSpocalypse" of more traditional enterprise software-as-a-service vendors getting disrupted by artificial intelligence upstarts including Claude maker Anthropic and ChatGPT maker OpenAI-with single-focus SaaS vendors more vulnerable to disruption than the database products giant. "You've all heard the thesis or theory that new companies coding quickly using AI will spell the death of SaaS-I don't agree with that at all," Sicilia said. "I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we weren't adopting them, but we are. Very rapidly." Oracle's embrace of new AI tools are part of "why we think we're a disruptor," Ellison said on the call. "That's why we think the SaaSpocalypse applies to others." Measures Oracle executives shared on the call illustrating its growing AI business include the company delivering more than 1,000 agents in its horizontal back office and industry apps, not including customer-built agents and agents Oracle uses internally. In the quarter, Oracle saw more than 2,000 customers go live with Oracle application projects. In February, Oracle revealed that it wants to raise $45 billion to $50 billion of gross cash proceeds during the 2026 calendar year using a balanced combination of debt and equity financing. The financing will go to the OCI business and building additional capacity to meet the contracted demand from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Facebook parent Meta, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Elon Musk's xAI, TikTok and other large OCI customers.

Oracle layoffs planned as data centre costs surge: Bloomberg - The Economic Times

Oracle plans thousands of job cuts as it struggles with cash pressure from a huge AI data-centre expansion. The cloud company is investing heavily to support deals with OpenAI, xAI and Meta. Investors worry about rising debt, while hiring slows and some roles may shrink due to AI.Enterprise software company Oracle is planning thousands of job cuts as it faces a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday. Long a smaller contender in the cloud market, over the past year Oracle has emerged as a major player in the business ⁠of renting computing ⁠power thanks, in part, to its $300 billion deal with OpenAI. But investors have grown worried about how it would fund the data center expansion needed to serve OpenAI and other customers, including Elon Musk's xAI and Meta. In December, the company said it expects capital expenditures for fiscal 2026 to be $15 billion higher than the $35 billion figure the company estimated during ⁠its first-quarter earnings call. The layoffs will impact divisions across Oracle and may be implemented as soon as this month, the Bloomberg report said, citing ⁠people familiar with the matter. Some cuts will be aimed at job categories that the company expects will shrink due to AI. The planned reductions are expected to be wider-reaching than Oracle's typical rolling job cuts, according to Bloomberg. This week, Oracle announced internally that it would be reviewing many of the open job listings in its cloud division, effectively slowing down or freezing the hiring process, the report added. Oracle declined to comment when contacted by Reuters. The company had about 162,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2025, according to its annual filing ⁠with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The software company, chaired by billionaire Larry Ellison, in February outlined plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion this year in order to expand its cloud infrastructure, fueling investor concerns about its rising debt load. Oracle will report third-quarter results on Tuesday. Its shares fell more than 15% last year, with its December results showing about $10 billion in cash burn for the first half of the fiscal year.

Oracle Targets Job Cuts In The Thousands: Report

Oracle last reported an employee count of about 162,000 in May 2025. With just days until Oracle's third fiscal quarter results call, reports have emerged that the vendor plans to cut thousands of jobs in its cloud division and others to help fund its artificial intelligence data center expansion. The cuts will hit positions less needed as the Austin, Texas-based database and cloud products vendor invests in AI, according to Bloomberg. Wall Street analysts predict that Oracle's cash flow will stay negative for years due in part to the vendor's AI build out, with spending starting to pay off in 2030. Oracle last reported an employee count of about 162,000 in May 2025. About 31 percent of those employees were in research and development, 23 percent were in services, 19 percent were in sales and marketing, and 18 percent were in cloud services and license support operations, according to regulatory filings. [RELATED: Oracle Layoffs Hit Employees With OCI, Media Services, Sovereign Cloud] Oracle declined to comment in an email to CRN. Last year, Oracle laid off hundreds of employees, including some associated with its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business. The vendor will disclose its results for the third quarter of its 2026 fiscal year on Tuesday. In February, Oracle revealed that it wants to raise $45 billion to $50 billion of gross cash proceeds during the 2026 calendar year using a balanced combination of debt and equity financing. The financing will go to the OCI business and building additional capacity to meet the contracted demand from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Facebook parent Meta, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Elon Musk's xAI, TikTok and other large OCI customers. In December, during the vendor's previous earnings call, co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said that rapid delivery of Oracle capacity should help improve gross margins quickly reach 30 percent to 40 percent. The vendor shared some growth milestones for its AI business, with more than 700 AI customers on its platform, including the majority of large model providers, and more than 270 customers are live in production on Oracle Health's Clinical AI Agent. The vendor's AI products should also present a multiplier effect for its more traditional cloud business and other parts of the portfolio, its executives have said. Oracle isn't the only technology vendor to consider layoffs as AI remakes the IT landscape and 2026 gets underway, with cuts revealed this year at Autodesk, Kaseyaand Amazon. Oracle's stock was up more than 1 percent on Thursday and rose in after-hours trading, with the price at about $156.12 a share.

Larry Ellison's Oracle slashing thousands of jobs due to AI cash...

Enterprise software company Oracle is planning thousands of job cuts as it faces a cash crunch from a massive AI data center expansion effort, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. Long a smaller contender in the cloud market, over the past year Oracle has emerged as a major player in the business of renting computing power thanks, in part, to its $300 billion deal with OpenAI. But investors have grown worried about how it would fund the data center expansion needed to serve OpenAI and other customers, including Elon Musk's xAI and Meta. The software company, chaired by billionaire Larry Ellison, in February outlined plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion this year in order to expand its cloud infrastructure, fueling investor concerns about its rising debt load. The layoffs will impact divisions across Oracle and may be implemented as soon as this month, the Bloomberg report said, citing people familiar with the matter. Some cuts will be aimed at job categories that the company expects will shrink due to AI. The planned reductions are expected to be wider-reaching than Oracle's typical rolling job cuts, according to Bloomberg. This week, Oracle announced internally that it would be reviewing many of the open job listings in its cloud division, effectively slowing down or freezing the hiring process, the report added. Oracle declined to comment when contacted by Reuters. The company had about 162,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2025, according to its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Oracle Allocates Extra $500 Million to Cover Restructuring Costs

Oracle will spend $500 million more on restructuring costs in the current fiscal year than previously reported as artificial-intelligence models allow the company to shrink parts of its workforce. The additional spend--which will cover redundancy packages and other exit costs--brings the total costs for its restructuring program to $2.1 billion over the year ending May 31, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission report filed Wednesday. That figure is an increase on the $1.6 billion the company said it expected to spend in its previous quarterly filing in December, suggesting an acceleration in its job cutting program. The cloud computing giant's outlay on restructuring had already shot up by 337% on-year in the nine months ended Feb. 28. Oracle said Tuesday alongside third-quarter earnings that increasingly powerful AI models would allow it to cut jobs across its software teams. "AI models for generating computer code have become so efficient that we have been restructuring our product development teams into smaller, more agile and productive groups," the company said. The company hasn't disclosed how many jobs will be cut, and didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The Austin-headquartered company is among a clutch of major tech names to point to AI developments when announcing large cuts to its workforce. Jack Dorsey's payment processing company Block attributed a 40% cut in its workforce to AI developments earlier this year. Fears that autonomous AI agents would damage software-as-a-service companies' business models reached fever pitch earlier this year, with shares in tech companies the world over selling off in response. Speaking to investors Tuesday, Oracle co-Chief Executive Mike Sicilia addressed these concerns. "Some smaller or single-focused SaaS players may well be disrupted," Sicilia said. "But Oracle will not be among them." Shares edged down 0.5% in premarket trading.