Oracle reportedly undergoing round of layoffs amid push toward AI

Oracle has cut an unspecified number of jobs as the software giant looks to reduce costs and continue growing its artificial intelligence business, according to former employees and multiple reports.

Numerous former employees posted on LinkedIn on Tuesday, March 31, that Oracle fired them. It's uncertain how many workers were affected, but CNBC reported that the company's layoffs were in the thousands, citing persons familiar with the move.

Those who posted about the firings held positions in software engineering and cybersecurity. Elsewhere on Reddit, in what is labeled an Oracle employees group, there was discussion about job cuts in Canada, India and the United States over the last week.

Oracle declined to comment to USA TODAY. As of March 31, the company had not filed a recent Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice, a legally required warning that employers with 100 or more employees must provide 60 calendar-day advance notice of planned closings and mass layoffs.

Why would Oracle want to lay off employees?

Workers were notified by email, several online commenters said. The emails began arriving in employees’ inboxes at about 6 a.m. local time, Fast Company reported.

"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," read copies of the email obtained by Business Insider. "As a result, today is your last working day."The job reductions could account for about 30,000 jobs, or about 18% of Oracle's total workforce, Luke Yang, an analyst with the research firm Morningstar, told USA TODAY.

The layoff "should improve Oracle's operating efficiency … and boost its revenue per headcount significantly," to match competitors such as Microsoft, Yang said.

"The main areas affected are most likely software engineering because AI-based coding tools (Codex, Claude Code) have dramatically improved software engineers' efficiency," Yang said. "This round's layoff is global. We see some engineers in India got impacted, too. I don't think the layoff would affect Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's ramp-up plans."

Oracle had been planning to cut thousands of jobs as early as the end of March, Bloomberg reported on March 5, to save money and offset its AI data center expansion.

In January, President Donald Trump announced the Stargate venture to ramp up U.S. AI deployment, with Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son at the White House. Ellison said the first of the project's data centers is currently under construction in Texas.

Oracle's cash flow is expected to trend negative over the coming years due to data center spending, with expenditures expected to pay off in 2023, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Last month, Oracle said it would raise as much as $50 billion this year through a combination of debt and equity sales.

Contributing: Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, USA TODAY; Reuters.Mike Snider is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him atmikegsnider  &  @mikegsnider.bsky.social  &  @mikesnider & [email protected].