Oracle cut 21,000 jobs last year, according to an SEC filing. One reason for this is obviously AI.
As published on Stock Titan, the filing said, “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations has resulted in, and may continue to result in, reductions in our workforce.” The relevant paragraph begins with bold text, “Our periodic workforce restructuring and reorganization can be disruptive,” which certainly sounds plausible.
Oracle is a giant tech company known for creating database software that became prominent during the tech boom of the 90s. However, Oracle is best known as a cloud computing provider. Its co-founder and former CEO, Larry Ellison, was briefly the world’s richest man last year amid market enthusiasm over AI.
Alison is also a close friend of President Trump. An anonymous Trump adviser reportedly told a Wired reporter last year that Ellison was the “shadow president of the United States.”
As Bloomberg reported, Oracle had about 162,000 employees. year ago, and now has 141,000. This led to several changes, which also resulted in “$1.8 billion in restructuring costs”.
The filing also said the restructuring could lead to “a shortage of adequately skilled staff in certain roles, loss of valuable institutional knowledge, and harm 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 to not only accelerate our SaaS business, but to deliver solutions that enable entire ecosystems across multiple industries.”
In addition to using AI internally, Oracle keeps spending money to build data center capacity for its customers, like OpenAI, that it desperately needs — gambling, essentially, that eventually companies like OpenAI will pay so much for compute that it will be able to pay off all its debt. Oracle’s capital spending last fiscal year came to $55.7 billion.
An anonymously obtained Bloomberg article in March said the layoffs were due to Oracle being short of cash. From this latest filing it appears
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