Oracle cutting thousands in latest layoff round as AI spending booms
Software maker Oracle has started telling employees that it’s conducting a round of layoffs, two people familiar with the move told CNBC.
The layoffs were in the thousands, said the people, who asked not to be identified to discuss a confidential matter. As of May 2025, the company employed 162,000 people. Oracle declined to comment.
While Oracle is on the receiving end of market panic about competitive risk from generative artificial intelligence models, it’s also facing pressure from investors about how much the company’s AI infrastructure investments will cut into cash flow.
The company continues to sell its flagship database for storing and serving up corporate information. In recent years, alongside cloud rivals such as Amazon, Oracle has ratcheted up capital expenditures as it builds data center infrastructure that can handle AI workloads. But Oracle is smaller than its cloud peers.
Oracle has been leaning on the debt market to fund its buildout. In January, Oracle announced plans to raise $50 billion in debt and equity. During earnings last month, executives said there were no more plans to raise debt in 2026.
In September, Oracle disclosed that its remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, jumped 359% to $455 billion following an agreement with OpenAI worth over $300 billion. Weeks later, Oracle picked executives Mike Sicilia and Clay Magouyrk to replace its CEO, Safra Catz.
Cutting 20,000 to 30,000 employees could lead to $8 billion to $10 billion in incremental free cash flow, TD Cowen analysts led by Michael Elias wrote in a January note.
Executives have said its AI investment will pay off, over time. “Demand for AI infrastructure, both GPU and CPU, continues to exceed supply. This is directly visible in our $553 billion remaining performance obligations,” Magouyrk said on an earnings call earlier this month.
Business Insider reported on the layoff announcements earlier on Tuesday.
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