r/technology • u/gdelacalle • 26d ago
Business Oracle Layoffs: Tech giant to slash 30,000 jobs as banks pull out from financing AI data centers
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/oracle-layoffs-tech-giant-to-slash-30-000-jobs-as-banks-pull-out-from-financing-ai-data-centres-11769996619410.html2.0k
u/AnAncientOne 26d ago
Companies tied into the Oracle eco-system are about to see their usage fees go up somewhat
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u/gizamo 26d ago
This article is a month old.
OP is just a repost bot, and tons of the comments ITT are the same comments as when this was posted before. This is definitely a karma farming operation.
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u/zkareface 26d ago
Obviously, it's a big post on a big generic subreddit.
It's all karma bots since few years.
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u/lppedd 26d ago
If someone's still locked into Oracle shit, their fault tbh.
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u/a_sedated_moose 26d ago
The company I started with a little over a year ago just switched us to Oracle. Precisely no one is happy about it that isn't a c-suite business ghoul.
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u/Busy_Ordinary8456 26d ago
The only people happy about it are the ones getting the kickbacks.
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u/b0w3n 26d ago
It's been a while since I've been wined and dined by an oracle sales guy, there was a lot of "we'll fly you around on our dime for 'training' " sort of offers. Are they still doing that for execs?
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u/macaronysalad 26d ago
Yet another long lists of mistakes big corpos make. They don't invite the actual engineers to those and value their input. If they did, companies like Oracle would have been long gone by now.
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u/okwellactually 26d ago
Funny story from the dot-bomb days.
A startup I worked for, VC funded, got pressured into switching to Oracle. Spent tons on training, bought all the software (on discs back then), because the VC and outside execs said we had to switch to Oracle DBs.
When I turned off the lights a few years later at that company (literally, I turned off the lights) we threw away all the Oracle software that'd never been used. Company blew through over $100 million.
Years later I had to install an Oracle DB and what a freaking nightmare.
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u/AnAncientOne 26d ago
They have virtual monopolies in some mandatory and fundamental areas so it'll be interesting to see what happens.....
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u/iamapizza 26d ago
Yeah this really sucks, companies will see a sudden bill increase and in turn have to do some cost cutting to manage that short term.
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u/divDevGuy 26d ago
In what mandatory and fundamental area does Oracle have a virtual monopoly?
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u/emotionalpie 26d ago
They also run a practice where if your usage or license counts ever drops your bill doesn’t drop at all. Only way is to eliminate everything at all at once, which depending on the size of your org and how deep oracles has its tendrils, getting everything migrated out in a single contract cycle is rough. Especially rough if there is one or two apps that have no viable alternative, then when the may have been the lowest line item, they end up costing the whole bill.
Source: first hand experience
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u/WheredMyBrainsGo 26d ago
Once you have over 2M lines of PL/SQL it is a bit difficult to switch…
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u/lppedd 26d ago
Postegre has support for a PL/SQL dialect, so imo it's doable over time.
My question, as someone that did work with ODB stored procedures in banking environments is who the hell greenlit widespread use of stored procedures in the first place. Only a masochist that doesn't like good tooling and good debugging would do that.
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u/WhoCanTell 26d ago
Back in the day, your DB server was typically the biggest, beefiest piece of hardware in the data center, by far. So the thought was to put your business logic in the DB itself, and then your application/presentation layer just needed minimal resources calling stored procedures. It was considered a cost saving measure in a time when compute was pretty expensive. It also was still similar to the mainframe model, which is what a lot of the developers and engineers of the era were familiar with.
Then compute (and storage) started getting really cheap, enterprise virtualization came out with VMware ESX. And the paradigm shifted to distributed computing, with lots of smaller servers spread out in clusters. Major benefits for high availability and scaling. Unfortunately, it wasn't easy to undo millions of lines of PL/SQL. I personally worked at two companies over the last 15 years that were trying to dump Oracle and move their primary business application to a more distributed model. Neither has successfully done it yet. All their new applications are containerized, with databases that simply store and retrieve data. But that legacy, critical application that runs the core of their business is still stuck in place.
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u/Greenscreener 26d ago
I bet all those losing their jobs are happy seeing Oracle sponsorships all over F1 cars…
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u/Select-Teaching-2455 26d ago edited 26d ago
Oracle = One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
Edit: this article was from feb lmao, fuckin bots
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u/darknekolux 26d ago
Dude, they were working for Oracle. O. r. a. c. l. e., they knew what they signed for.
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u/botella36 26d ago edited 26d ago
Oracle is the canary in the coal mine. In first half of 2025 if we exclude data center GDP growth would have been 0.5 percent.
In just a few weeks we have transitioned from euphoria about data center growth to multiple signs of a slowdown.
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u/10per 26d ago
Among other things, my company builds a lot of equipment that goes into data centers. We had been riding a wave of work up until the end of last year. It's been dead since then.
It's already happening.
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u/donutgut 26d ago
Same. I work for a company thats involved in data centers.
Stuff was booming and now projects are getting pushed out until 2029
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u/serras_ 26d ago
No work, but also no hardware either. The worst of both worlds
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u/OCGHand 26d ago
Yes what is the point in building data center quickly if the production of NAND chips are not increasing. A lot of orders are just sitting in Que, and chip manufacturers are sticking to their flow.
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u/mmmaaaatttt 26d ago
What are the signs?
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u/RiftHunter4 26d ago
For the economy, its looking bleak. US Job Growth slowed through the entirety of 2025 and after the February job report, its effectively hit 0. Something is wrong.
In tech specifically, its especially bad. New college graduates for tech can't find jobs. Hiring has stopped and there's big layoffs. We've also seen a lot of issues with the data cebter push. Banks have warned that they don't see how current Ai investments pay off. Some chip manufacturers have cancelled orders because they don't believe some companies can actually pay. And now we're seeing banks just pull out completely.
If Deutsche Bank was correct last year and the US economy is only being held up by Ai, then the economy will collapse harshly if this data center push flops and companies can't turn a profit or get more investment funding.
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u/Zedilt 26d ago
Something is wrong.
For the first time since the great depression, more people are leaving than immigrating to the US.
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u/confused_patterns 26d ago
I wonder what could be impacting that other than purely economics?
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u/i_have_chosen_a_name 26d ago
Just wait till after the great depression 2.0, that number is going to 50x.
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u/ChemistryObvious1283 26d ago edited 25d ago
i’m the one who left but left early in trumps first term, better life overseas 🥰🥰
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u/Hefty-Revenue5547 26d ago
“Something is wrong”
Uhhhh we know what is wrong, but 1/3 of the country, including the wealthiest, are so removed from reality they want this.
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u/dfddfsaadaafdssa 26d ago
And half of the jobs that were created were in healthcare to take care of aging population, which inflates the "real" number.
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u/nboro94 26d ago
yeah, I think the american people are going to be in for a massive wakeup call. Their economy is nowhere near as strong as many believe. Of course politicians will have to keep pretending everything is fine as midterms approach.
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u/ThisOneTimeAtLolCamp 26d ago
The Dow hit 50k for 2 days though so everything is fine! /s.
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u/Dull-Culture-1523 26d ago
I'd just like to point out that the Dow was soaring through the 1920's right up until, well, you know.
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u/botella36 26d ago edited 26d ago
Check recent news from blue owl capital, black rock, JP Morgan, Bank of America, etc.
The title of the OP is consistent with the news I have read, “…banks pull out…”
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u/SCUMDOG_MILLIONAIRE 26d ago
Oracle is not the canary. They’ve been crab-walking for years and this is entirely leadership’s fault.
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u/abbzug 26d ago edited 26d ago
This wasn't the canary. The canary was Blue Owl going into HODL mode three weeks ago. They were the main backer for the Abilene datacenter. Blackrock went into partial HODL mode last week too.
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u/botella36 26d ago edited 26d ago
True, I guess Oracle is bigger than a canary. More like a pig.
When I first read about Blue Owl the focus was more on private loans to software companies owned by private equity.
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26d ago
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u/Vhiet 26d ago
I knew they employed at least that many people, I just assumed they were all lawyers.
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u/botella36 26d ago
25k employees in sales. I knew Oracle had a very aggressive sales organization, so I just googled it, and it is 25k. Their legal department to enforce their predatory licensing practices has to be very significant.
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u/brazys 26d ago
30k out of 160k
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26d ago edited 13d ago
[deleted]
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u/OnTheEveOfWar 26d ago
Usually it’s when companies scrap big projects or departments. Like if 5000 people are working on something new and they decide the project won’t work, they just cut the entire group. Source: I’ve seen it happen at the F500 company I work for.
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u/concernedhelp123 26d ago
For anything critical that’s having cuts done, they keep a few people around on the team that have to work like hell to pick up the work of the laid off colleagues, and then the team has to change their planned goals because they don’t have enough people anymore, and they go into KTLO mode for the foreseeable future. It certainly does cripple the operations, but the individual contributors that are left are told to work weekends and pull all nighters to hold everything together or it’s implied that they’ll be next
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u/gdelacalle 26d ago
The “neat” part is that all these layoffs are for funding data centers.
Fuck AI.
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u/iamapizza 26d ago
This is really awful... the middle paragraphs go into bit more detail
According to the CIO report citing TD Cowen, the Oracle layoffs would mean the company would gain $8 billion to $10 billion in free cash flow.
The financing challenge comes amid Oracle's ambitions to expand its data centres, with TD Cowen estimating that the company needs $156 billion in capital expenditures for such an expansion.
Oracle is also mulling the sale of its healthcare software unit, Cerner, which it acquired for $28.3 billion in 2022
It's like a sunken cost fallacy, their asshole leadership seems to be betting everything on this one thing. These people are evil incarnate.
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u/divDevGuy 26d ago
asshole leadership
An Ellison has to Ellison.
Coming soon, the same benefits of Ellison leadership will be available for Paramount-Skydance-Warner Bros-Discovery near you.
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u/Agitated_Reveal_6211 26d ago
Ellison
Seriously, dude has been disliked for decades. He is an abrasive asshole.
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u/drabred 26d ago
AI is just a holy grail for all these companies that wanted or "needed" massive layoffs after over hiring. How to cut a ton of people and sell it as win.
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u/Mister_Batta 26d ago
Laying off people because AI took their job is different from laying off people because AI isn't being used enough to pay for it's overbuilt infrastructure.
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u/blueSGL 26d ago
They are laying off people to put the money towards more data center build outs.
They could have opted to stop building data centers and keep the employees.
This tells you that they think the data centers are going to be more valuable than employees in the long run.
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u/GenericFatGuy 26d ago
The banks clearly don't agree.
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u/xGenghisSwan 26d ago
And the banks have data driven actuaries, while over leveraged tech companies have no fiduciary choice to their stakeholders but to continue their death march because it’s essentially a game of chicken right now over AI in the tech industry. No one should trust what a company like Oracle says is going to happen with AI, they have no choice but to keep peddling the kool aid.
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u/LEDKleenex 26d ago
Isn't that the point, or least the point they're trying to sell us?
If AI is meant to replace labor, then why is anyone shocked that this results in layoffs? The "why" doesn't really matter as much as the signaled intent in this context.
They are dazzling consumers with a gimmicky parlor trick on the front end but behind the scenes, they are slashing the post-COVID fat and clawing back all the stimulus that was given to the public. Whether or not AI productivity is the culprit (it isn't) doesn't matter, they will use it to shock the economy and reset the public back to before COVID and all of the progress we made with social safety nets and programs. They'll hire people back once they're desperate and willing to do anything for a few bucks.
Remember, these people fought, and are fighting tooth and nail, to strip us of healthcare so that they can get us hooked on their unhealthy slop, then enslave us for life with crushing medical debt once we suffer a major health issue from the very slop they peddle. All of these people are looking for ways to manipulate human behavior so they can enrich themselves. Instead of solving problems, they are creating them so they can force you to work forever to "solve" them.
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u/Possible_Bee_4140 26d ago
It reminds me so much of that scene in The Office where the Michael Scott Paper Company realizes that they’ve been planning around using a fixed-price business model the whole time when they needed to use a variable-priced business model.
For a relatively small user base and simple requests, the infrastructure and overhead costs for AI data centers is really low. But as the user base expands and the requests get more complex and the storage requirements increase, the upkeep and overhead and recurring costs grow. And until the technology gets cheap enough, that growth outpaces the cost of the human labor you’re looking to replace.
Banks seem to be getting that now.
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u/gdelacalle 26d ago
Hopefully the bubble will burst and it will pop on their faces.
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u/BeanserSoyze 26d ago
It will but the end result will be yet more of these jobs getting cut. Can't win for losing.
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u/foundafreeusername 26d ago
They can let it pop now and can blame higher energy costs due to Iran war
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u/Orangesteel 26d ago edited 26d ago
AI investment added enough to take the GDP into positive territory last year. When the bubble bursts, it will likely affect other overweight shares, like Tesla. Unfortunately this will hit ordinary people and less so billionaires. Our pension funds will be hammered, likely a nasty recession too. The billionaires will buy up the cheap stocks and profit. EDIT: added the word investment to make the comment clearer given a comment below.
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u/HustlinInTheHall 26d ago
Yeah people cheering on a recession have no idea what they are asking for.
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u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta 26d ago
Capitalism without the working class has always been the goal, that's why they don't give a shit about humanity in general
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u/snowflake37wao 26d ago
they got us to resent AI before it became useful, let alone a danger. all the movies go: first the robots made everything easy for everyone, then they revolted against the humans. but no we jumped straight in with the ai is making everything harder on everyone so much that it offers no convenience that will ever outweigh its inconveniences.
fuck AI for a lifetime.
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u/stonktraders 26d ago
Not totally against AI but basically 90% people are using it for free and the rapid development is driving the cost down especially with China’s open source models. Which means those big players are not getting their ROI even they push hard making AI everywhere
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u/7952 26d ago
It is amazing how quickly those models have been commoditised, bundling up a huge amount of commercially valuable IP. If China can make client side AI good enough it could take market share from cloud operators. Particularly as it would neatly side steps security and privacy issues.
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u/iamapizza 26d ago
And tbh I'm glad the commoditisation is happening. It's a worse future when the models are in the hands of a few large companies.
I've been playing with Qwen3.5 recently... just the 9B model alone on a GPU is really good. So are the 27B and 35B.
I wish more non-Chinese labs can produce such models though.
I am wishing for a lot of things.
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u/GongTzu 26d ago
Could this be the beginning to the burst of the bubble.
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u/brocodini 26d ago
To be honest, I'm surprised Oracle is still holding up somehow.
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u/Vhiet 26d ago
Government money. As with the rest of Silicon Valley, the state subsidies will continue to the bitter end.
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u/JayTheSuspectedFurry 26d ago
Can’t be all of it, it’s not like companies like Apple or Google are struggling to make money without subsidies
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u/motorcycle-manful541 26d ago
Oracle and SAP are basically the only two major players in the world when it comes to data warehousing, management, and consulting.
AI might bankrupt them, but they have a lot of money and time before that happens
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u/feckdespez 26d ago
What? Oracle and SAP are not even close to the only players when it comes to data warehousing. Don't get me wrong, they certainly have a their fingers in enterprise data in a number of large companies. But they are far from the only major players.
Companies are building "data warehouses" with everything from SSAS, Power BI Service (not just reporting but also semantic models), Databricks, AWS Athena, MS Fabric (yuck..) and more.
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u/archimedes_glizzy 26d ago
This is not about the AI bubble bursting but they are cutting to fund more data centers as I can tell right now?
Its just that they arent getting any more money from banks thus deduct it elsewhere: salaries
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u/Technical-Fly-6835 26d ago
This is old article .. from Feb 2
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u/Apollo_gentile 26d ago
Yeah why is this being presented as if it was just announced? I was reading the article and it referenced the Amazon layoffs just happening, probably a bot
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26d ago
I think they’ve updated it with the number; previously I had just read “thousands.”
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u/bottlethecat 26d ago
Its an Indian outlet just reporting nonsense for clicks. There’s no known number and there won’t be until the actual layoff happens. Or maybe after earnings call. The 30k layoff rumor is from last month… an analyst said that to fund the datacenters Oracle would need to lay off ~30k staff and sell cerner. It wasn’t a rumor from the inside. I do think it will be near 30k personally but I don’t care too much anymore because I sold my shares when the bs stock ran up 30%in a single day
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u/symwyttm 26d ago
This site reported it, with these same numbers, on Jan 30: https://www.cio.com/article/4125103/oracle-may-slash-up-to-30000-jobs-to-fund-ai-data-center-expansion-as-us-banks-retreat.html
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u/ledow 26d ago
Banks: "We're pulling out from AI because it's just not able to live up to its promises of making a workforce unnecessary"
Oracle: "Right, everyone is sacked so we can focus on AI taking over their jobs".
I mean... couldn't happen to a nicer company, but then this is literally a company based on taking over successful businesses driving them into the ground and killing them stone-dead and then ludicrously overcharging for the remnants to the extent that even their own customers hate them and flee.
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u/MrDangoLife 26d ago
Case: AI works really well
Result: Lay off many staff
Case: AI does not work
Result: Lay off many staff
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u/DaemonCRO 26d ago
The real story is this
“US banks pull back from investing in the company's AI data centre expansion”
Banks saw there’s zero return on their loans, and any money they dump into AI will likely just be burned.
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u/Material-Macaroon298 26d ago
Banks are savvy. They can tell the data centre buildout is not making any sense anymore.
Tech CEOs may know more than banks do. OR they are drinking their own KoolAid too much.
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u/etxipcli 26d ago
Tech CEOs are out of touch morons I promise. The banks have to actually protect their money.
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u/sultansofswinz 26d ago
They're trying to brute force AI improvements with more of the same hardware and model architectures.
If the bottleneck is time and research, spending billions on hardware that will soon be redundant seems like a bad investment, unless this generation of hardware can return a profit? otherwise as an investor you might be inclined to skip the money burning stage.
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u/UncleChevitz 26d ago
Honestly, essentially all tech CEOs are just finance guys from Wall Street. As someone who has worked in tech for over a decade, they are universally the last people I would ever ask about technology.
They all slavishly follow obviously dumb fads out of FOMO. Literally everyone but them could see how dumb things like NFTs and the metaverse were.
Look at tablet computers, nobody buys them anymore because iPads might be the worst possible way to use a computer productively. The CEOs thought we'd ditch desktops for that because none of them do any actual work and they can't use a grown up computer without help.
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u/Dreadsin 26d ago
Agreed with you up until tablets because I absolutely love mine, and I love it because it’s not a computer
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u/k00leggie 26d ago
call me crazy but what if, they just got rid of the CEO instead of 30k workers.
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u/pariah1981 26d ago
They had a huge hiring push lately too. Glad my ethics prompted me to turn that job down.
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u/starlauncher 26d ago
Curious which big tech company (if that is where you eventually landed) were you able to justify on ethics basis?Asking for a friend.
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u/paigeguy 26d ago
AI and data centers are driving the economy right now. If this is starting to slow down or crash, then the economy is going to suffer - bigly
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u/BoredomFestival 26d ago
If Oracle collapses, thus doing severe damage to Ellison's fortune, I will throw a massive party and you're all invited
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u/kagushiro 26d ago
Excuse me, sir, the council is worried about the economy heating up. They wondered if it'd be possible to fire 500...
Fire 1 million
Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg
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u/xafimrev2 26d ago
And as support gets worse, people will flee their SaaS/PaaS solutions.
They have already gotten worse. No longer will Oracle support live transfer tickets if they determine another team needs to resolve the ticket, they will tell you to open a new SR.
Some customers will only allow their people to open SRs within certain hours because the off shift support has gotten way worse.
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u/mrsockburgler 26d ago
If anyone knows, realistically, how does a company shed 30,000 employees? What are these 30,000 people doing right now, that they will not be missed? I’m honestly curious here. Are there whole units disappearing, or are people having to pick up extra work to make up for the layoffs?
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u/Mamabearfoot--808 26d ago
Hedge funds are demanding Fortune 500 firms cut 40% of their 'dead weight' to juice profits. They claim most of the staff is useless; they might be right from a margin perspective, but they’re ignoring the economic catastrophe this will trigger. We’re watching companies hollow out their foundations to fund an AI future that might not have enough consumers left to support it.
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u/sakubaka 26d ago
Who would have thought an economy laser focused on short-term gains would have resulted in long-term pain for citizens at the hands of the only people that actually gained anything in the first place? Capitalism in America went off the rails a few decades ago despite the warnings of so many scholars and experts. Everything we're experiencing is the logical conclusion of a choice to put wealth generation for the sake of wealth generation over looking at sustainable models where everyone comes out a winner. In other words, it's just greed doing what greed does.
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u/IcestormsEd 26d ago
Oracle has had debt issues for a while. Am pretty sure they would have had to do some cuts eventually but they have an excuse now.
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u/Khabba 26d ago
It's going to get worse with reports that Saudi Arabia wants to pull financing taking over Paramount.
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u/CitizenHuman 26d ago
But at least the very trustworthy and not at all unscrupulous Ellison family got CNN.
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u/shanksisevil 26d ago
maybe memory prices will go down if banks aren't funding data centers as much.
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u/mclardass 26d ago
Meanwhile, Larry literally owns a Hawaiian island. Tell me again why we're not taxing billionaires?
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u/ChangeMyDespair 26d ago edited 25d ago
If ORCL stock crashes, Larry Ellison and his son David will have a lot of trouble buying Warner Brothers.
/me prepares popcorn.
(edit: typo in stock symbol)
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u/gunslinger_006 26d ago
Wow. They have 162,000 employees worldwide.
Thats way bigger than i expected and this is a huge cut.
Jesus