Oracle is preparing to lay off thousands of employees across multiple divisions, with the cuts expected to occur this month. The layoffs are reportedly targeting job categories the company believes can be backfilled with AI, and are outside its usual cycle.
These cuts coincide with a reported hiring slowdown or freeze in its cloud division, despite that division's role in Oracle's strategic plans. The moves come as Oracle makes massive investments in AI data centers, anticipating financial losses until 2030, which has contributed to a significant drop in its stock price.
The company is also planning to raise approximately $50 billion through debt and equity sales, with some investors having sued over alleged misrepresentations of its spending forecasts.
Main topics: Layoffs, AI integration, financial performance, and strategic investments.
Oracle reportedly set to axe thousands of jobs and freeze hiring as AI data center bets ignite financial perfect storm — cuts in cloud division to be backfilled with AI
2030 profitability is the big question on everyone's minds.
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The job reaper of AI has visited many a home in the past year alone, and this time it's knocking at Larry Ellison's door. According to a Bloomberg report citing inside sources, the database and cloud service giant is preparing to fire thousands of people across multiple divisions.
These layoff plans are still private, but Bloomberg's sources expect they'll happen this calendar month. As for a reason for the cuts, two informants said they'll happen in job categories that Oracle expects to effectively backfill with AI. This new wave of cuts is also reportedly not within the scope of the firm's usual layoff cycle.
There isn't an exact figure for the number of jobs getting axed, but as of last May, Oracle counted around 162,000 heads worldwide. There's a chance this cost-cutting may be more than just optimization, too, as Bloomberg's confidants noted that Oracle posted an internal announcement saying it will review its cloud division's open job listings, a move that purportedly signals a hiring slowdown or outright freeze.
The backdrop for these cuts is that just like OpenAI, Oracle is posting large bets on AI datacenters and expects to be deep in the red until 2030, spending hundreds of billions along the way. Investors aren't taking kindly to the gargantuan scale of these investments nor to the circular nature of their ecosystem, and consequently, Oracle's stock price has dropped about 50% since its September 2025 peak. That said, the firm is still trading well above 2023 levels.
All things considered, it's not out of the question that Ellison might not just be optimizing its workforce, but rather applying a chainsaw to the firm's spending so it can weather the coming spending storm. It's slightly puzzling that the hiring freeze would extend to cloud service job listings, since those are supposed to enable Oracle to execute its plan.
Some investors even went as far as suing the company for misrepresenting its spending and borrowing predictions. Oracle plans to raise around $50 billion through debt and equity sales, so it's a fair guess that Ellison's bean counters are working hard to balance the books.
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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
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