Oracle Slashes 21,000 Jobs as AI Reshapes the Tech Giant’s Workforce

Oracle has cut roughly 21,000 jobs over the past year, shrinking its global workforce by 13% as the software and cloud computing giant accelerates its pivot toward artificial intelligence.
According to the company’s latest annual regulatory filing, released Monday, Oracle’s headcount fell from about 162,000 employees a year ago to roughly 141,000 as of May 31, 2026. It marks one of the largest publicly disclosed AI-linked workforce reductions among major technology companies to date.
In the filing, Oracle acknowledged directly that the rollout of AI tools across its operations has already led to job losses — and warned that further cuts could follow as adoption deepens. The company pointed to a mix of factors behind the reductions, including management restructuring, shifting product priorities, performance reviews, strategic realignment and the integration of recent acquisitions.
The transition has come at a steep price. Oracle spent $1.84 billion on severance and other restructuring costs in fiscal 2026, up sharply from $374 million the year before — a clear signal of how aggressively the company is reshaping its operations.
The cuts landed hardest in research and development, where about 7,000 positions were eliminated, representing 14% of that division’s staff. Oracle’s hardware unit saw the steepest proportional cut, losing roughly a third of its employees.
The layoffs have reverberated strongly in India, where Oracle maintains a major presence across hubs including Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Gurugram. Reports suggest more than 12,000 jobs were affected there alone, and the company also rescinded a number of campus job offers extended to graduates from top engineering institutes, fueling anxiety among the country’s tech workforce.
Under Chairman Larry Ellison, Oracle has been steering away from its roots as a database software provider and toward a future built around AI infrastructure and cloud computing. The company is investing heavily in large-scale data centers to support AI workloads for clients such as OpenAI, putting it in direct competition with cloud leaders Amazon and Microsoft. Unlike those rivals, Oracle doesn’t generate comparable cash flow internally, leaving it more reliant on debt and outside financing — the company has projected roughly $70 billion in capital expenditure for the current fiscal year alone.
Oracle’s cuts add to a broader wave of AI-linked layoffs sweeping the tech sector in 2026, with companies including Amazon, Meta, Dell, Block and Intuit all citing automation and AI adoption as factors in recent workforce reductions — even as many of those same companies report strong revenue growth.

Source BBC NEWS