Oracle seems to be going forward with another round of major lay-offs soon. Employees anticipate mails anytime, with September 1 as a key date. The move is expected to be aimed at the company’s budget reduction process. The action could take place at the beginning or in the middle of September.
September 1 is also the day Oracle’s second fiscal quarter begins. One of the members directly acquainted with the process revealed the company’s plan to reduce its payroll as the second quarter began.
Over a period of 12 months till May 31, Oracle has disclosed that it sliced out 21,000 jobs, reducing its global workforce by 13 percent. Employee estimates suggest the total workforce reduction to be in the range of 7,000-10,000. This concludes with the total estimated impact of 30,000 employees.
Oracle’s Indian workforce is a significant part of the company’s overall structure, with India hosting its major engineering and other technology teams. Oracle’s current Indian workforce stands around 30,000, which could be significantly impacted through the expected round of lay-offs. An earlier round is reported to have impacted around 12,000 Indian employees.
The massive lay-off is not a part of organisational restructuring as the reports suggest. Rather suggest, teams have been asked to reduce their budgets, which reiterates the possibility of job cuts across various teams and functions. Employees in the higher-salary brackets are more prone to anxiety regarding the probable lay-off.
Those who are familiar with previous lay-offs at Oracle disclosed that around the time of termination, access to internal communication channels, including Slack, was lost. Also, there was no interaction with HR or the manager, making it difficult even for the managers to have transparency with the company regarding the final list of the affected roles.
The developments come as the company continues to invest heavily in cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence. The job cuts come as Oracle heavily spends on AI and cloud infrastructure, as its business continues to grow. The company’s total revenue rose 17 percent to $67.4 billion in FY 2026, while cloud revenue jumped 39 percent to $34 billion. Cloud infrastructure revenue grew sharply, rising 77 percent to $18.1 billion.
Oracle has also said that customers are helping fund its AI expansion by either paying in advance for GPUs or supplying the GPUs themselves. This hardware in its large AI contracts now totals $75 billion, reducing the amount Oracle needs to spend on building AI data centres. The company adjusts its extensive spending on AI and cloud infrastructure by cutting down on its payroll.
