Oracle laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday as it ramps spending on AI infrastructure projects internally and with major technology partners.
The layoffs were carried out via email, according to copies of the message viewed by Business Insider. The email told affected workers they would be terminated immediately and to provide a personal email for follow-up.
Oracle declined to comment to The Register.
The cuts echo a TD Cowen forecast earlier this year, when the investment bank questioned how Oracle would finance its expanding AI datacenter buildout and suggested headcount reductions could reach 20,000 to 30,000. It is not clear how many employees were notified on Tuesday, but one screenshot that purports to show the number of internal Slack users showed a drop of 10,000 overnight.
Big Red has also partnered with OpenAI and SoftBank on the Stargate project, a massive project to build datacenters around the country to help power generative AI models, starting with one in Abilene, Texas. The headline numbers were ridiculously large – OpenAI said the venture intended to invest $500 billion, and even if the actual number falls well shy of that, it’s still a massive promise.
In a September filing [PDF] with the SEC, Oracle said it was planning its largest restructuring yet in its current fiscal year, which started in June, with an expected cost of $1.6 billion. During its most recent earnings call on March 10, Oracle said it expected to spend $50 billion on capital expenditures during fiscal 2026, according to Douglas Kehring, executive vice president and principal financial officer.
Oracle has previously said it reserves most of its spend for “revenue generating equipment” that builds out datacenter capacity, which returns margins of 30 to 40 percent.
Oracle employs about 162,000 people, with 58,000 of those in the US and approximately 104,000 internationally. If the rumored cuts of 30,000 are correct, it would amount to 18 percent of the company’s workforce.
According to posts from Oracle workers on LinkedIn, the cuts were spread through multiple departments around the country, with employees in Kansas, Tennessee, and Texas taking to social media to say they were among those chopped.
“I’m incredibly proud of what I was able to build over the past 4 years, from intern to full-time, and grateful for the experience, mentors, and teammates along the way,” wrote a software engineer from Texas.
She said she helped build and launch FreeSQL.com, Oracle’s next-generation SQL learning platform, from the ground up and played a key role in the LiveSQL-to-FreeSQL rewrite, “improving onboarding and developer experience for thousands of users.”
In another post, a 20-year Oracle veteran in the security group said he had no bitterness and saw the cut coming.
“Not unexpected as I was able to use my AI coding skills to take over a lot of my daily tasks,” he wrote, adding a laughing emoji to the line. “While this isn’t how I imagined this chapter ending, I’m incredibly grateful for the experiences, the work, and most importantly, the people. I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with talented teams, build lasting relationships, and be part of work I’m truly proud of.” ®