‘Today Is Your Last Day’: Oracle Axes Thousands as AI Data Centres Swallow the Payroll
New York: Oracle has begun another wave of global job cuts, telling employees in early-morning emails that their roles have been eliminated and that the day they received the notice is their last working day. The company has not confirmed the scale of the latest round. Independent estimates put the number in the thousands—ranging from about 5,000 to as high as 10,000—on top of a workforce that already shrank by roughly 21,000 people, or 13 per cent, in the fiscal year ended 31 May 2026.
The message was blunt. After “careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs,” the company said it was eliminating positions as part of a “broader organisational change.” Corporate logins were often disabled before the email arrived. Affected staff were offered four weeks of base salary plus one additional week for each year of service. Some teams, according to reports, faced reductions of more than 10 per cent. Engineering, enterprise software, sales, support and health-technology groups have been among those named in employee accounts.
Oracle is not talking publicly about headcount. Its filings are doing the talking. In a quarterly report, management said it had supplemented its 2026 restructuring plan by about $700 million after 31 August, taking expected charges for the year to roughly $2.8 billion. The plan, the company wrote, is meant to improve operational efficiency “including through the adoption and integration of artificial intelligence technologies across certain functions.” AI had not been named so explicitly as a driver of restructuring in earlier descriptions of the same programme.
The human cost sits beside a capital-spending boom. Oracle reported $28.5 billion in capital expenditure in its most recent quarter, more than three times the $8.5 billion spent a year earlier. It has kept a fiscal 2027 capex forecast of $90 billion to $95 billion as it races to build data centres and power infrastructure for AI workloads. Remaining performance obligations—a measure of contracted future revenue—have climbed to $664 billion after more than $30 billion in additional AI cloud contracts in a single quarter. The company is hiring in data centres, power, AI and machine learning even as it dismisses staff elsewhere.
That is the bargain now familiar across big tech: fewer people in older product and support lines, more steel, silicon and electricity for the next generation of models. In fiscal 2026 Oracle’s full-time workforce fell from about 162,000 to about 141,000. The company spent some $1.8 billion that year on severance and other exit costs, up from $374 million the year before. It has warned that restructuring “can be disruptive” and may leave skill gaps that hurt productivity. India absorbed a large share of the earlier reduction, with reports of about 12,000 roles affected in that year alone; Indian staff are watching whether the September wave follows the same path.
Oracle’s official line, offered earlier to the BBC when the 21,000-person decline first became public, is that as its cloud and AI businesses grow it will “continually balance our resources and restructure our development group” so the right people deliver the products customers want. The market hears something simpler. Payroll is being trimmed so that tens of billions can be poured into racks, substations and long-term power deals. Rivals such as Amazon and Meta have run the same playbook. Sector trackers put tech layoffs this year well above 100,000.
The contrast is sharp for engineers whose work is being automated or reclassified as non-core. Oracle has described internal use of AI agents to take over tasks once done by large database-administration teams. Whether those anecdotes scale or not, the direction is no longer in dispute: the company that once sold databases and enterprise suites is betting its future on being a landlord of AI compute. For thousands of employees, that future arrived at 6 a.m., in an inbox, with a sentence that left no room for appeal.
