Oracle Plans Another Round of Layoffs as AI Spending Fuels Pressure on Jobs

Business Insider, which first reported the plan citing people familiar with the matter and an internal document, said reductions on some teams could reach double-digit percentages.

The planned cuts would add to the roughly 21,000 full-time roles Oracle has already eliminated, representing about 13% of its workforce. The company’s headcount fell from around 162,000 in May 2025 to about 141,000 at the end of May 2026, with roughly 49,000 employees remaining in the United States.

The latest round comes as Oracle itself has attributed part of the decline in its workforce to the adoption and deployment of AI, the same technology the company is borrowing tens of billions of dollars to develop and sell.

Oracle’s March layoffs illustrated the scale and speed of its restructuring. On March 31, more than 10,000 employees received emails at 6 AM informing them that their roles had been eliminated, with the affected employees told that the same day would be their final working day.

Employees cut on March 31 were notified first thing in the morning. The message, sent from “Oracle Leadership,” said their role had been eliminated as part of a broader organisational change and that it was their last working day.

Staff in both the US and India were affected. LinkedIn posts from employees who were laid off pointed to cuts across Oracle Health, Sales, Cloud, Customer Success and NetSuite. Roughly 10,000 positions were eliminated in that single wave.

The email thanked employees for their contributions, said severance paperwork would arrive through DocuSign and instructed recipients to submit a personal email address immediately because access to their computers, email and files was about to be switched off.

Oracle has also spent most of its $2.1 billion restructuring budget. Severance costs have contributed significantly to the company’s restructuring expenses. Oracle booked $1.8 billion in restructuring costs in FY2026, up from $374 million a year earlier, a 391% increase.

Its 10-K, filed on June 22, put the total expected cost of the plan at $2.1 billion, leaving about $300 million in remaining headroom. Cuts at the scale described by Business Insider would either have to fit within that remainder or push Oracle into its second new restructuring plan in three years.

TD Cowen analysts estimated in January that eliminating 20,000 to 30,000 workers could unlock $8 billion to $10 billion.

At the same time, Oracle’s spending on AI data centres has sharply increased pressure on the company’s finances and workforce. Capital expenditure reached $55.7 billion in FY2026, up from $21.2 billion a year earlier, as Oracle accelerated data centre construction for customers including OpenAI.

Oracle raised $43 billion in debt and $5 billion in equity during the year, expects around $40 billion more in FY2027 and recorded negative free cash flow of $23.7 billion. Interest expense alone increased to $4.6 billion from $3.6 billion.

The company’s underlying business, however, has continued to grow. FY2026 revenue increased 17% to $67.4 billion, while cloud infrastructure revenue grew 77%. Remaining performance obligations reached $638 billion at the end of the year, after standing at $553 billion at the end of Q3.

Oracle has also told investors that AI code generation is allowing it to reorganise product development into smaller teams. The company said the technology helps it build “more software in less time with fewer people.”

That statement, made to shareholders in March, takes on greater significance as another round of job cuts approaches in August.

Investors have not been won over either. Oracle’s stock is down more than 20% this year, while shareholders sued in January over what Oracle said about how much it would need to borrow to service its $300 billion OpenAI commitment.

For employees included on this month’s lists, the immediate issue is the elimination of their roles as Oracle moves to reduce payroll before a deadline set by its fiscal calendar. The company’s broader financial strategy remains tied to the massive investment it is making in AI data centres and the expectation that those investments will deliver returns after the workforce reductions take effect.