Oracle last reported an employee count of about 162,000 in May 2025.
With just days until Oracle’s third fiscal quarter results call, reports have emerged that the vendor plans to cut thousands of jobs in its cloud division and others to help fund its artificial intelligence data center expansion.
The cuts will hit positions less needed as the Austin, Texas-based database and cloud products vendor invests in AI, according to Bloomberg. Wall Street analysts predict that Oracle’s cash flow will stay negative for years due in part to the vendor’s AI build out, with spending starting to pay off in 2030.
Oracle last reported an employee count of about 162,000 in May 2025. About 31 percent of those employees were in research and development, 23 percent were in services, 19 percent were in sales and marketing, and 18 percent were in cloud services and license support operations, according to regulatory filings.
[RELATED: Oracle Layoffs Hit Employees With OCI, Media Services, Sovereign Cloud]
Oracle Layoffs
Oracle declined to comment in an email to CRN.
Last year, Oracle laid off hundreds of employees, including some associated with its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business.
The vendor will disclose its results for the third quarter of its 2026 fiscal year on Tuesday. In February, Oracle revealed that it wants to raise $45 billion to $50 billion of gross cash proceeds during the 2026 calendar year using a balanced combination of debt and equity financing. The financing will go to the OCI business and building additional capacity to meet the contracted demand from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Facebook parent Meta, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, TikTok and other large OCI customers.
In December, during the vendor’s previous earnings call, co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said that rapid delivery of Oracle capacity should help improve gross margins quickly reach 30 percent to 40 percent.
The vendor shared some growth milestones for its AI business, with more than 700 AI customers on its platform, including the majority of large model providers, and more than 270 customers are live in production on Oracle Health’s Clinical AI Agent. The vendor’s AI products should also present a multiplier effect for its more traditional cloud business and other parts of the portfolio, its executives have said.
Oracle isn’t the only technology vendor to consider layoffs as AI remakes the IT landscape and 2026 gets underway, with cuts revealed this year at Autodesk, Kaseyaand Amazon.
Oracle’s stock was up more than 1 percent on Thursday and rose in after-hours trading, with the price at about $156.12 a share.
