Oracle cuts 21,000 jobs as AI investments accelerate

AI taking over jobs and eventually replacing humans is a real thing now. The latest annual report of Oracle revealed that the company reduced its workforce by around 21,000 employees over the last year. Interestingly, this comes at a time when the cloud giant is spending aggressively on AI infrastructure, data centres, and cloud services to compete with rivals like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. According to the filing, Oracle now has around 141,000 employees globally, down from roughly 162,000 employees a year ago. That’s a decline of nearly 13 percent. Also Read: Ai+ Nova 2 Neo and Nova 2 Pro 5G launched: Madhav Sheth throws open review challenge

And here too, AI is the culprit. Oracle says the workforce reduction is linked to multiple factors, including restructuring, management changes, acquisitions, business priorities, and the growing use of AI technologies across its operations. Also Read: Adobe brings Firefly AI Assistant to Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator and more: Here’s what it can do

In fact, the company has openly acknowledged that AI deployment has already contributed to workforce reductions and could continue to impact staffing decisions in the future. While reports about layoffs at Oracle had surfaced earlier this year, the latest filing gives a much clearer picture of the overall scale of the cuts. Also Read: 8 ChatGPT prompts to draft emails like a pro

The company hasn’t specified which teams were affected the most, but the message seems fairly clear. As AI takes over more tasks, companies are also rethinking how many people they need across certain functions.

Oracle working on AI?

The timing of these job cuts is worth noting. While Oracle is reducing its workforce, it is simultaneously increasing investments in AI infrastructure. The company has been expanding its cloud business and signing major deals with AI companies, including OpenAI and Meta. The goal is simple: become a bigger player in the AI infrastructure race.

Unlike some of its larger rivals, Oracle is pushing aggressively to build more data centres and cloud capacity to support the growing demand for AI workloads. The company has already indicated that it plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure expansion over the coming years.

Oracle isn’t alone

The interesting part is that Oracle is not the only company taking this route. Over the last year, several technology companies have reduced their workforce while increasing AI spending. Amazon, Meta, and Google have all announced significant AI investments alongside multiple rounds of layoffs.

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Many companies argue that AI can help improve productivity and automate repetitive work. However, it has also raised concerns about how the technology could reshape jobs across the industry in the coming years. Industry trackers estimate that well over 100,000 tech workers have been affected by layoffs over the past year alone.