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Oracle laid off 21,000 employees over the past year, citing AI as one of the reasons

The company says its AI adoption and deployment may result in further reductions.

By Mariella Moon

June 23, 2026 7:16 am EST

Ken Wolter/Shutterstock

Back in March, it was widely reported that Oracle had sent anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 employees an email, notifying them that it was their last day with the company. Now, we have a more concrete number of people who had lost their jobs. In its annual regulatory filing, Oracle said that it employs approximately 141,000 people worldwide as of May 31, 2026. That's down 21,000 employees from the 162,000 people employed by the company in the same period last year. Around 49,000 of its current full-time employees are in the US, while 92,000 are employed internationally. It's not clear how many employees in the US were let go.

In its filing, the company said that it has an "existing restructuring plan in place" and that it made and will continue to make adjustments to its workforce. It admitted that the "adoption and deployment of AI technologies" across its operations "have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions" to its numbers. The company had already spent $1.8 billion in restructuring costs, which include severance payments for laid-off employees.

As Bloomberg had previously reported, Oracle cut thousands of jobs in order to have more readily available cash it can use for its AI data center buildouts. Other companies in the industry, such as Microsoft, had also cut jobs to fund the high upfront costs needed to build AI infrastructure and to adopt AI as a whole. Meta had also laid off 8,000 employees and reassigned 7,000 people to AI-focused roles. In Oracle's case, it's building data centers for its clients, with OpenAI being one of the biggest. If you'll recall, OpenAI struck a deal last year for Oracle to supply it with 4.5 gigawatts of US data center capacity, which will power the massive workload required by its large language models.