Software giant Oracle on Tuesday started laying off workers as it looks to rein in costs and double down on artificial intelligence.
On LinkedIn, Oracle employees, including software engineers, account executives and program managers, shared publicly that they were affected by a mass layoff at the company and were looking for new jobs.
Oracle was founded in California, but moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in 2020.
The company, which sells software and other services to help businesses manage and store data, hasn’t said publicly how many jobs were cut. CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Oracle was slashing thousands of workers. As of May 2025, Oracle had 162,000 workers.
Oracle has offices throughout the world, including in California in Irvine, Santa Monica, Redwood City and Santa Clara. It’s unclear if the mass layoff also affected workers in California. Oracle declined to comment.
The company is the latest tech firm to shed workers as it focuses more heavily on AI. Meta, Block, Amazon, Salesforce and other tech giants have continued to lay off their workers even as they hire for other roles and spend billions of dollars on AI data centers and products.
U.S.-based tech employers announced more than 33,000 job cuts from January to February, up 51% compared with the same period last year, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in March.
Business Insider reported earlier on the Oracle cuts, citing an email the company sent to employees early Tuesday.
“After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day,” the email stated.
As part of their pivot to artificial intelligence, Oracle, OpenAI and Softbank announced last year that they would invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years in a project called Stargate. Companies rely on a massive trove of data to train and maintain AI systems, increasing the demand for data centers that house computing equipment. Oracle has also teamed up with with AI chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s most valuable tech company.
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has been playing a bigger role in Hollywood too.
He backed his son David’s Paramount bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, personally guaranteeing $40.4 billion to support the offer. Competing against streaming giant Netflix, Paramount Skydance prevailed in the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, striking a deal valued at more than $111 billion.
Oracle is the cloud provider for TikTok, a short-form video app that faced threats of a ban in the United States because it’s owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance. TikTok then struck a deal to create a new U.S. entity to avoid a ban. Oracle’s stake in TikTok’s U.S. operation, which includes other managing investors such as Silver Lake and MGX, is roughly $2 billion, according to a March filing from Oracle.
Oracle’s stock price jumped more than 5% on Tuesday to $146.92 per share following reports of the company’s job cuts.
Since January, Oracle’s shares have dropped more than 24%. Oracle has benefited from the AI boom but investors have been wary about how much the company is spending. Oracle also competes against Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and others for business customers.
In February, Oracle said it would raise up to $50 billion through debt and equity to expand its cloud infrastructure business, which includes customers such as AMD, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI and xAI.
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