Oracle laid off thousands of people on Tuesday in a move that was widely anticipated as more and more tech companies claim they’ll need fewer workers thanks to the AI boom.
The total number of people let go is unclear. However, earlier this year, investment bank TD Cowen had predicted the number could be as high as 30,000 in a company of about 162,000 people globally, according to CNBC.
The email that workers received notifying them they’d been laid off has gone viral on social media. The workers received an otherwise anonymous, early morning email from “Oracle Leadership” that informed them of “difficult news” regarding their position with the company.
“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 working day,” the email began.
Oracle has invested heavily in AI and many investors have raised concerns about the way that it’s financing its data centers. The company is taking on tens of billions of dollars in debt for Stargate, the project announced with much fanfare at the White House just a couple of day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time in Jan. 2025. Trump falsely claimed at the time that Stargate would create “over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately.”
The Stargate project, which involves a partnership with OpenAI and Softbank, hasn’t materialized in quite the way that it was promised over a year ago when up to $500 billion in spending was pledged. OpenAI has been unable to meet deadlines and CEO Sam Altman admitted last week: “Anything at this scale, it’s just like so much stuff goes wrong.”
Financial analysts at Barclays point out that the layoffs at Oracle will help offset the massive debt that the company is taking on by making such a huge bet on data centers. Barclays also notes that Oracle workers have been less productive compared to others in the industry, according to CNBC.
The full scope of the layoffs at Oracle remains a mystery as the company hasn’t made a formal announcement of how many people it let go. But we’re starting to get some solid numbers from local news outlets where Oracle is large presence. Oracle’s campus in Kansas City, Missouri, for instance, is laying off 539 employees. We only know about that because Oracle filed a WARN Act notice with the state, something that’s required for employers with over 100 employees that may be conducting mass layoffs.
Other big tech companies have also seen recent layoffs attributed to the AI boom, with Amazon laying off 30,000 workers since October 2025 and Block cutting 40% of its staff in February. Block CEO Jack Dorsey basically positioned the move as anticipatory, suggesting that AI would make everyone more productive and he didn’t want to make piecemeal cuts over a long period of time, opting instead to do massive layoffs now.
How any of this will play out is anyone’s guess, especially in a fraught geopolitical environment. President Trump’s war against Iran, launched Feb. 28, has disrupted the flow of 20% of the world’s oil. The price of energy has an enormous impact on the price of all goods, to say nothing of the direct impact on the ability of countries to just supply their populations with gasoline and diesel to operate. Some countries in Asia are now rationing fuel and the Prime Minister in Australia gave an address to the nation this week imploring people to use less energy.
AI might deliver tremendous productivity gains that help the economy thrive. Or it might allow companies to rationalize layoffs that ultimately harm the U.S., a country where consumer spending accounts for roughly 70% of the economy. It’s hard to for consumers to spend money if they don’t have a job, as many Oracle employees no longer do.
