Over the past year, Oracle eliminated 21,000 jobs, according to an SEC filing. Apparently, part of the reason is AI.
As published in common titan, The filing says that “the adoption and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies in our operations has resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” The relevant paragraph begins with bold text that says, “Our periodic workforce restructurings and reorganizations may be disruptive,” which certainly seems plausible.
Oracle is a huge technology company best known for creating database software that became a staple during the technology boom of the 1990s. However, Oracle is increasingly known for being a cloud computing provider. Its co-founder and former CEO, Larry Ellison, was briefly the richest man in the world last year amid market exuberance over AI.
Ellison is also a close friend of President Trump. An anonymous Trump adviser reportedly he told a Wired reporter last year that Ellison was a “shadow president of the United States.”
As noted by BloombergOracle had approximately 162,000 employees a year ago, and now it has 141,000. This has led to a series of changes that also resulted in “$1.8 billion in restructuring costs.”
The filing also says the restructuring may lead to “shortages of sufficiently trained employees in certain functions, loss of valuable institutional knowledge, and harm to employee morale and retention.”
during a presentation of results in MarchMike Sicilia, CEO of Oracle, said his company “is using the best AI coding tools and best developers to not only accelerate our SaaS business, but also to deliver solutions that enable entire ecosystems across numerous industries.”
In addition to using AI internally, Oracle simply maintains spend money to build the data center capacity that its customers, like OpenAI, so desperately need: betting, essentially, that eventually companies like OpenAI will pay it so much for computing that it will be able to pay off all its debt. In the last fiscal year, Oracle’s capital expenditures totaled $55.7 billion.
A Bloomberg article from March of anonymous origin He said Oracle’s cash crunch was leading to layoffs. This seems to be confirmed in this latest presentation.
