Senior members from tech giant Oracle have announced the company has made significant job cuts as it makes big investments in artificial intelligence (AI).
In a post to LinkedIn, Oracle senior manager Michael Shepard confirmed the job cuts.
“Oracle conducted a significant reduction in force that impacted some of the most talented, dedicated, and high-performing people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside,” he said.
“The individuals affected were not let go because of anything they did or didn’t do.”
Oracle has been using AI tools internally, and executives said it enables fewer employees to do more work.
"The use of AI coding tools inside Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly," Mike Silicia, Oracle's other co-chief executive, said earlier this month.
Oracle is one of the largest tech companies in the world and offers software and cloud computing infrastructure to other companies.
One employee told the BBC that around 10,000 people are believed to have lost their jobs so far, citing the number of staff active on Oracle’s internal messaging system Slack.
As of May 2025, the company employed 162,000 people.
Oracle has been relying on the debt market to fund its buildout and compete with its cloud peers like Amazon.
Earlier this year, Oracle announced plans to raise US$50 billion in debt and equity; executives said there were no more plans to raise debt in 2026.
In September, Oracle disclosed that its remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognised, jumped 359% to $455 billion following an agreement with OpenAI worth over $300 billion.
TD Cowen analysts wrote that cutting 20,000 to 30,000 employees could lead to $8 billion to $10 billion in incremental free cash flow in a January note.
Executives have said its AI investment will pay off, over time.
“Demand for AI infrastructure, both GPU and CPU, continues to exceed supply,” Magouyrk said on an earnings call earlier this month.
“This is directly visible in our $553 billion remaining performance obligations.”
