Oracle’s 21,000 layoffs help drive its AI investment to expand credit

The growth of AI caused Oracle to lay off 21,000 employees a year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission delivery on Monday.

In its annual filing for the fiscal year ended May 31, Oracle said it has 141,000 full-time employees. In its 2025 filing, Oracle said it has 162,000 employees. A reported reduction of 12.9 percent followed March reports of mass layoffs at a database management company.

“(T)he adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations has resulted in, and may continue to result in, workforce reductions,” it said.

However, job cuts are also associated with higher construction costs Oracle’s data center infrastructure support AI services.

“Many of the actions created by the 2026 Restructuring Plan were made to achieve our continued focus on developing, marketing, selling, and delivering our cloud-based offerings,” this week’s news release reads.

Oracle plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in 2026 to expand Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for customers such as OpenAI, xAI, AMD, Nvidia, and Meta, it said in February. About half of the funding will come from debt, and the rest from equity. When Oracle announced this, investors were already there I have been worried of debt that Oracle is growing to bolster its AI efforts. In total, Oracle has more than $120 billion in debt, as of its 2026 financial report.

In February, bondholders sued Oracle, claiming they lost money because Oracle hid the need to raise debt to build its AI infrastructure, Reuters report.