Oracle Cuts Thousands of Jobs After Monthslong Stock Decline

Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs, CNBC reported Tuesday (March 31), citing unnamed sources.

The software maker, which employed 162,000 people as of May, has seen its stock price drop 25% this year, according to the report.

Investors have been concerned about the potential threat artificial intelligence poses to Oracle’s software business and about the amount of debt the firm has raised to build data centers for AI workloads, per the report.

Reached by PYMNTS, Oracle declined to comment on the report.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Oracle employees and posts on LinkedIn said that Oracle’s job cuts spanned across the company’s business lines and included employees based in the United States and India.

The WSJ added that some employees said there were signs of thousands of job cuts and that analysts at investment bank TD Cowan predicted earlier this year that Oracle would mitigate the cost of its investment in AI by laying off as many as 30,000 employees.

It was reported in January that Oracle’s stock reached a record high in September, when the company issued an outlook for its cloud unit that signaled steep demand for AI, but dropped by more than 50% by January.

The January report attributed the drop to rising concern among investors about AI spending among tech giants without an obvious path to return on investment, as well as worries about “circular deals” between the unprofitable startup OpenAI and companies like Oracle.

Earlier in January, it was reported that Oracle was sued by bondholders alleging that the company made false and misleading statements in the offering documents for an $18 billion debt sale related to AI infrastructure.

On March 24, Oracle introduced several new or updated features designed to help enterprises deploy AI agents. The company said 22 new Fusion Agentic Applications are available, including ones designed to assist human resources (HR) leaders, supply chain leaders, sales teams and finance teams. It also announced that it added a new agentic applications builder to its Oracle AI Agent Studio and that it added new agentic AI innovations for Oracle AI Database.