The growing use of AI contributed to Oracle shedding 21,000 staff in a 12 months, in accordance with a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday.
In its annual regulatory filing for the fiscal 12 months ending May 31, Oracle said it has 141,000 full-time employees. In its 2025 filing, Oracle said it had 162,000 employees. The reported 12.9 percent reduction followed March reports of mass layoffs on the database management software company.
“[T]he adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and should proceed to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the filing reads.
Nonetheless, the job cuts are also tied to large capital expenditure to construct Oracle’s data center infrastructure to support AI workloads.
“Nearly all of the initiatives undertaken by the 2026 Restructuring Plan were effected to implement our continued emphasis in developing, marketing, selling, and delivering our cloud-based offerings,” this week’s filing reads.
Oracle plans to lift $45 billion to $50 billion in 2026 to expand its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for purchasers like OpenAI, xAI, AMD, Nvidia, and Meta, it said in February. About half of that funding will come through debt, with the rest coming from equity. When Oracle announced this, investors had already been concerned about Oracle’s growing debt to fuel its AI efforts. Overall, Oracle has over $120 billion in debt, per its fiscal 12 months 2026 earnings report.
In February, bondholders sued Oracle, claiming that they lost money because Oracle hid the necessity to raise its debt to construct its AI infrastructure, Reuters reported.