Oracle shed about 21,000 jobs over the past year as it restructured operations and leaned further into artificial intelligence.
Oracle cut its global workforce by roughly 21,000 jobs over the past fiscal year, a reduction the company tied in part to its growing use of artificial intelligence. The cloud computing company’s total workforce fell 13% in fiscal 2026 as it continued to restructure its business. The figures came out in Oracle’s annual report, released Monday.
The company employed about 141,000 people as of May 31, 2026, down from roughly 162,000 a year earlier. That drop of around 21,000 staff makes the reduction larger than earlier reports through the year had suggested.
In its regulatory filing, Oracle was direct about the role AI played. The company said the adoption and deployment of AI technologies across its operations had resulted, and might continue to result, in workforce reductions. It also listed several other factors behind the changes, including management and product shifts, performance issues, strategic decisions and acquisitions.
The cuts did not come cheap. Oracle spent about $1.84 billion on severance payments and other exit costs linked to the restructuring in fiscal 2026, far above the $374 million it spent the year before. The company acknowledged the changes could be disruptive, pointing to the higher restructuring costs and a drop in productivity.
The reductions had been building over time. They followed a series of reports earlier in the year about Oracle trimming thousands of positions. The annual filing put the full scale of those cuts in one place for the first time.
Oracle Workforce Reduction Mirrors Wider AI Layoffs in Tech
Oracle is not alone. The reduction lands during a broader stretch of AI-related job cuts across the technology industry. Meta let go of 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, in May, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg telling staff that success was not guaranteed in the age of AI. Microsoft began offering voluntary buyouts to 7% of its U.S. employees in April.
The pattern goes back further. AI was linked to more than 50,000 layoffs in the United States in 2025, with large firms including Salesforce and IBM cutting thousands of roles.
The job cuts sit against a backdrop of strong financial growth for Oracle. The company has been expanding its cloud infrastructure rapidly to meet demand for AI training and inferencing, and it has guided toward $90 billion in total revenue for fiscal 2027. Investors reacted cautiously to the workforce news, though, with the stock under pressure during a wider technology selloff.
The smaller headcount reflects a company reshaping itself around AI while spending heavily to build out the data centers that power it. The annual report frames the cuts as part of that shift rather than a retreat, even as the human cost of the transition comes into sharper focus.
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