Oracle Lays Off 'Thousands' of Employees Amid AI Investments

Oracle is reportedly laying off ‘thousands’ of employees, amid increases in AI spending to  build out its infrastructure. 

Estimates from the BBC place the number of employees who have lost their jobs at 10,000, with more layoffs possible. 

In an email sent out to employees as reported on by Business Insider, the company stated that the decision to cut jobs had been made “after careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs.” 

As of May 2025, the company employed around 162,000 people. 

AI investments at Oracle

Oracle has been investing significantly in the development of AI infrastructure – with plans in place to spend around US$50bn in CapEx for its 2026 fiscal year. 

In a 2025 Q3 earnings call discussing these investments, Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said that the company was “bringing on enormous amounts of capacity over the next 24 months,” as it builds out its AI infrastructure.

AI is also decreasing the company’s workforce needs. 

In March, co-CEO Mike Sicilia told investors that “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 suites.”

A growing restructuring budget

The company added an additional US$500m to its restructuring costs in March 2026 – bringing its total restructuring costs for the fiscal year to more than US$2bn.

The restructuring budget is designed to cover redundancy packages as well as other exit costs for employees. 

Analysis from TD Cowan suggested that this budget may lead to between 20,000 and 30,000 job cuts across the fiscal year. 

Prior to this announcement, the company had shared that AI was reducing the number of employees the company needs within its product teams. 

It said: “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. 

“This new AI Code Generation technology is enabling us to build more software in less time with fewer people. Oracle is now building more SaaS applications for more industries at a lower cost.”

Rising AI layoffs

Oracle is not the only tech company looking at reducing its headcount. 

A report from Reuters has suggested that Meta is potentially planning job cuts that could impact 20% of its workforce in order to help offset its AI infrastructure spend. 

In 2025, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Meta, shared at a 2025 White House dinner that Meta plans to invest “at least US$600m” in US infrastructure, which includes hundreds of billions of dollars to begin construction on several data centres.  

Following this, Meta announced that it was launching Meta Compute, a division of the company dedicated to building and managing AI infrastructure. 

Atlassian has also announced that it plans to cut 10% of its employees, with AI changing how the company operates and the skills it needs for the future workforce. 

Mike Cannon Brookes, CEO of Atlassian, said of the cuts: “It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”