Oracle Lays Off Thousands at 6 a.m. in an Email, Making Room for AI Data Center with $10 Billion

According to 1M AI News monitoring, Oracle initiated a large-scale layoff on Tuesday. CNBC cited two sources to confirm the layoffs impacting thousands of employees; an Oracle employee told the BBC that based on changes in internal Slack user activity, approximately 10,000 people have been affected. TD Cowen analysts estimated in January that a reduction of 20,000 to 30,000 employees at Oracle could result in an additional $8 billion to $10 billion in free cash flow. As of May 2025, Oracle had approximately 162,000 global employees.

Several employees described the layoff process on social media: At 6 a.m. ET, a termination email from "Oracle Leadership" arrived in their inboxes, informing them that the same day would be their last working day, with no prior notice from their managers or HR. Upon signing the DocuSign resignation document, they would receive one month of severance pay, and any unvested restricted stock units would be immediately forfeited. Oracle Senior Manager Michael Shepherd posted on LinkedIn that the layoffs included senior engineers, architects, operations leads, project managers, and technical experts, and the layoffs were unrelated to performance.

The layoffs directly serve Oracle's aggressive investment in AI infrastructure. In January of this year, the company announced a $50 billion investment in data center construction through debt and equity financing, as part of the Stargate initiative (a $500 billion total investment in collaboration with OpenAI and SoftBank). Co-CEO Clayton Magouyrk stated during this month's earnings call, "The demand for AI infrastructure, whether GPU or CPU, continues to outstrip supply," with total contracts awaiting confirmation reaching $553 billion. Oracle's stock price has fallen by 25% this year, surpassing all other tech giants, but rose approximately 5% after the layoff announcement. Oracle declined to comment.