Oracle Cuts 21,000 Jobs in One Year, Blames AI For at Least Some

Over the past year, Oracle has cut 21,000 jobs, according to an SEC filing. Part of the reason is apparently AI.

As published on Stock Titan, the filing says “the adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” The relevant paragraph begins with bolded text reading, “Our periodic workforce restructurings and reorganizations can be disruptive,“ which certainly seems plausible.

Oracle is a massive tech company best known for creating database software that became a staple during the 90s tech boom. Increasingly, however, Oracle is known for being a cloud computing provider. Its co-founder and former CEO, Larry Ellison, was briefly the richest man in the world last year amid market exuberance over AI.

Ellison is also a close friend of President Trump. An anonymous Trump advisor reportedly told a Wired reporter last year that Ellison was a “shadow president of the United States.”

As noted by Bloomberg, Oracle had 162,000 employees about year ago, and now has 141,000. This has led to a series of changes that also resulted in “$1.8 billion in restructuring costs.”

The filing also says restructuring can bring about, “shortages of sufficiently skilled employees in certain roles, loss of valuable institutional knowledge and damage to employee morale and retention.”

During an earnings presentation in March, Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia said his company “is using the best AI coding tools and the best developers not only to accelerate our SaaS business, but to deliver solutions that enable entire ecosystems across numerous industries.”

In addition to using AI internally, Oracle just keeps spending money to build the data center capacity its customers, such as OpenAI, so desperately need—gambling, essentially, that eventually companies like OpenAI will pay it so much for compute that it will be able to repay all its debt. In the last fiscal year, Oracle’s capital expenditures came to $55.7 billion.

An anonymously sourced Bloomberg article from March said Oracle’s shortage of cash was leading to layoffs. That appears to be borne out by this latest filing