Oracle Cuts Thousands of Jobs to Raise Billions for AI Data Centers

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, Oracle initiated a large-scale layoff on Tuesday. CNBC cited two insiders confirming that the layoffs affected thousands of employees; one Oracle employee told the BBC that based on changes in active users on the company’s internal Slack, approximately 10,000 people have been impacted. TD Cowen analysts estimated in January that reducing 20,000 to 30,000 employees could generate an additional $8 billion to $10 billion in free cash flow. As of May 2025, Oracle has approximately 162,000 employees worldwide. Several employees described the layoff process on social media: at 6 AM (Eastern Time), termination emails signed by ‘Oracle Leadership’ arrived in inboxes, informing recipients that the day would be their last working day, with no prior notice from supervisors or HR. After signing the DocuSign termination documents, employees would receive one month of severance pay, and unvested restricted stock units would be immediately forfeited. Oracle senior manager Michael Shepherd posted on LinkedIn that the affected employees included senior engineers, architects, operations managers, project managers, and technical experts, and that the layoffs were not performance-related. The layoffs directly support Oracle’s aggressive investment in AI infrastructure. The company announced in January that it would raise $50 billion through debt and equity financing for data center construction and is also a participant in the Stargate project (in collaboration with OpenAI and SoftBank, with a total investment of $500 billion). Co-CEO Clayton Magouyrk stated during this month’s earnings call that ‘the demand for AI infrastructure, whether GPU or CPU, continues to exceed supply,’ with the company’s confirmed contract amounts reaching $553 billion. Oracle’s stock price has fallen 25% this year, more than any other tech giant, but rose about 5% on the day the layoff news was announced. Oracle declined to comment.