Oracle lays off thousands in latest sign of tough times for tech industry
Software giant Oracle began laying off staff on Tuesday in a bid to control costs and double down on artificial intelligence efforts.
On LinkedIn, Oracle employees, including software engineers, account managers, and program managers, publicly stated that they were affected by a mass layoff at the company and were looking for new jobs.
Oracle was founded in California, but moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas in 2020.
The company, which sells software and other services to help businesses manage and store data, has not publicly revealed how many jobs were cut. CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Oracle was cutting thousands of workers. As of May 2025, Oracle had 162,000 employees.
Oracle has offices around the world, including California in Irvine, Santa Monica, Redwood City and Santa Clara. It’s unclear whether the mass layoffs also affected workers in California. Oracle declined to comment.
The company is the latest tech company to lay off employees as it focuses more on AI. Meta, Block, Amazon, Salesforce and other tech giants have continued to lay off employees even as they hire for other roles and spend billions of dollars on data centers and AI products.
U.S.-based technology employers announced more than 33,000 job cuts between January and February, an increase of 51% from the same period last year, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in March.
Business Insider earlier reported on the job cuts at Oracle, citing an email the company sent to employees Tuesday morning.
“After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last day of work,” the email said.
As part of their transition to artificial intelligence, Oracle, OpenAI and Softbank announced last year that they would invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years in a project called Stargate. Companies rely on a huge amount of data to train and maintain their AI systems, increasing the demand for data centers housing computing equipment. Oracle has also partnered with the AI chip maker Nvidiathe most valuable technology company in the world.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison also took a larger role in Hollywood.
He supported his son David’s Paramount bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, personally guaranteeing $40.4 billion to support the offering. Competing with streaming giant Netflix, Paramount Skydance won the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, closing a deal valued at more than $111 billion.
Oracle is the cloud provider for TikTok, a short-form video app that has been threatened with a ban in the United States because it is owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance. TikTok then struck a deal to create a new U.S. entity to avoid a ban. Oracle’s stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations, which includes other lead investors such as Silver Lake and MGX, is worth about $2 billion, according to a March filing by Oracle.
Oracle’s stock price jumped more than 5% Tuesday, to $146.92 per share, following announcements of job cuts at the company.
Since January, Oracle shares have fallen more than 24%. Oracle has benefited from the AI boom, but investors are wary of the company’s spending. Oracle also competes with Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and others for business customers.
In February, Oracle announced it would raise up to $50 billion in debt and equity to expand its cloud infrastructure business, which includes customers such as AMD, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI and xAI.
