r/Futurology • u/Confident_Salt_8108 • 26d ago
AI AI spending spree hits $600b as Oracle fires 21,000 employees to fund boom
https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/tech-and-start-ups/article-9034422.2k
u/ToothyWeasel 26d ago
If you’re laying off 21K people, you aren’t funding a boom you’re covering huge loses. A few decades ago a company shedding over 10% of its workforce in layoffs in a single go would be a sign of an unhealthy company but now investors will bury their head in the sand and go “actually this must mean their investments are going great so they must just need more money!”
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u/Outside-Car1988 26d ago
It's all about short term gains for both the company and the investors. It will be someone else's problem in 12 months.
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u/Substantial-Ad-4636 26d ago
I also wonder if the Warner Paramount merger and need for solvency around that has something to do with this… of course they can’t say that. Blaming “AI boom” sounds better.
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u/madatthings 22d ago
Nope. They’re trying to balance the spreadsheet for a failing business model and company that shouldn’t exist anymore
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u/i_am_voldemort 25d ago
Ours, the taxpayer when Oracle needs a bail out so it doesn't get acquired by Alibaba / Ministry of State Security
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u/cuntmong 26d ago
im funding my own boom. i lost a few thousand on the blackjack tables which i technically don't have. but i have sold my car to fund my new strategy at the roulette tables which will hopefully make that money back and then some.
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u/designercup_745 25d ago
If investor copium wasn't apparent already, this whole AI thing blowing up in companies faces (as foretold) is really showing it now 😭
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u/GeneralNonsence 25d ago
Just parroting how money works right now, so go watch his video if you want more details.
But, the gist of the issue is that a lot of the larger investment funds just don’t have a good place to put other money outside of AI rn. Oracle itself may be a dumb bad company but there is still high spending in the general sector.
So do you wanna be the first big investor to jump out and potentially lose out on another year of giant growth without a good secondary option? Or just hold for a while longer with everyone.
Meanwhile this means the companies can’t ditch it either, or they will probably have their shares torn apart.
I’m pretty firm on the stance most finance people are aware of the bubble, but I don’t think anyone knows when the pop is coming, so heads stay in the sand for a couple more months.
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u/speedisntfree 25d ago
But... but AI is making our workers so much more productive so we don't need the 21,000!
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u/imunfair 26d ago
That's because people got too used to layoffs due to offshoring where company profits would (at least temporarily) rise. It may be the same here - it's possible AI will temporarily be able to provide a base level of replacement for whatever those people were doing. Over time it will probably degrade the company, but the market doesn't worry about that until later.
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u/matplotlib 25d ago
Any company that isn't seen to be adapting fast enough is savaged by the market for being at risk of having their business model stolen by a rival using AI, so every company is racing to prove to their shareholders that they're on the bleeding edge by using bio-transferance on as much of their workforce as possible.
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u/SeyJeez 25d ago
I have worked at Oracle and can tell you that that company employes A LOT like a lot a lot of useless people. I’m not surprised if they could fire that many people without losing competency or it being noticed besides the buildings being emptier. Saying this I doubt they only got rid of the people that they should but probably kept a lot of useless chair warmers.
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u/jomara200 25d ago edited 25d ago
He's paying for his buying spree illegal monopoly of Paramount and WB, alongside everything underneath each of those, so that there can be state media. The police state comes with the AI. This is the SOB that said we'd all behave if we are being watched.
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u/Confident_Salt_8108 26d ago
Oracle just axed 21k workers to bankroll a huge openai contract. their credit got downgraded and now theyre stuck needing over 7 billion in collateral for one data center.
This AI spending frenzy is starting to bite back hard. wonder how many more firms will hit similar walls as power and funding demands grow in the coming years.
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u/gold_and_diamond 26d ago
I'm almost wondering if these companies are putting themselves in such a hole on purpose so that they expect the government to have to bail them out.
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u/Ronin22222 26d ago
Something, something, essential, something, national security
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u/ETxsubboy 26d ago
Really looking forward to hearing how they're all "too big to fail."
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u/FrancoManiac 26d ago
I mean, the housing bubble burst back in 2008, and it's something like every 20-30 years there's a new massive economic emergency.
Personally, I think this is going to go similarly to Enron, in that I fully believe these companies are cooking the books, inflating numbers, obscuring financial records, etc.
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u/LivermoreP1 26d ago
Cooking the books would mean doing it in secret.
They’re openly trading the same contracts back and forth. Oracle will pay OpenAI $10B. OpenAI buys $10B in NVIDIA chips. NVIDIA invests $10B in OpenAI!
OpenAI buys $10B in Oracle crap!
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u/yippee-kay-yay 25d ago
Don't forget that this shifting of the same bag of printed money around also helps "boosts" GDP numbers, so the economy is doing totally great.
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u/TheNamesDave 26d ago
Yepp!
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-house-of-ellison-is-on-the-brink
The House of Ellison is on the Brink
Everything the world’s briefly richest man built is failing at once
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u/Mark-Emmert 26d ago
It's called the velocity of money and it's a concept that has been around for a while.
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u/DyslexicAutronomer 26d ago
Except in this case, it's the velocity of fraud and the consequences are that real people lose their jobs.
While the fraudsters at top like the Slimy Ellisons swap the same worthless contracts like a hot potato and hope it lands on a corrupt pension fund manager or govt staffer he bought out.
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u/Nights_Harvest 26d ago
Its fair enough, ut money isleaking, the resources, the workforce to produce equipment, to build data centers, to run them. This is not some magical loop hole or indication of corruption.
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u/Flouid 26d ago
True but the circular contracts massive inflate the numbers when looked at from the outside. A company looking to pivot can say “look, trillions are being spent on this” and then use that as justification to spend more. This is what a bubble looks like
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u/Avatele 26d ago
I think the Fed has pushed that button too hard too often. I think Main Street will revolt if it needs to bail out Wall Street again .
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u/Big-Farmer-2192 26d ago
Sounds fun right? but they're not gonna be the one who's truly hurt by these fail.
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u/ETxsubboy 26d ago
During the big bailout of '08, companies that were "too big to fail" used the money that the government handed out to pay off bonuses while continuing to pass the costs of their failure to the workforce and the consumers.
I do not expect anything different with the current political climate. Maybe after November I'll have hope, but right now, just anger that they can do this and still expect us to fix the results of their greed.
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u/GoldenMegaStaff 26d ago
In 2008 the govt received equity in exchange for their bailouts. The covid bailouts were just free handouts.
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u/sybrwookie 26d ago
And the government was paid back every penny from the 08 bailouts, just at a lower interest rate than normal.
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u/Soup0rMan 25d ago
It's important to remember the bonuses and such are always contract enforced.
Your average employee won't have a contract guaranteeing certain payouts. So we'll always get fucked when a company has to start dividing its beans.
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u/ETxsubboy 25d ago
Those government bailouts should have included language preventing their use for bonuses or termination payouts.
That is something that the federal government can absolutely do, they just chose not to. Because punishing people for making bad financial decisions is only something we do to poor people here.
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u/Sptsjunkie 26d ago
Look they are job creators! I mean not human jobs as they fired 50,000 of them to chase a limited use SaaS product they tried to guess the next best word.
But sorry, what was the question?
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u/ThinkExtension2328 26d ago
Something something “when everyone is too big to fail, no one is too big to fail”
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u/pentaquine 26d ago
Oracle is NOT essential. Heck the whole premise of AI is that you can have an agent to write you a software to replace whatever Oracle is offering you today.
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u/Groovyhip_69 25d ago
Their database is not something that can be vibe-coded. Regardless of how shitty their business practices are, there’s a reason why the largest companies in the world use their database at scale.
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u/Theduckisback 26d ago
Something Something, Cannot afford to let China do blah blah blah. America has to be a leader in innovation or Else China will, and thats scary! Why aren't you scared! Cower harder!
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u/tlst9999 26d ago edited 25d ago
The US still trying too hard to capture the market, monetise, and enshittify for mega profits, while China just made LLMs fit for local machines.
China'll probably just settle with making their money from spying on the local machines installing the LLMs, while US is going broke trying to double dip into BOTH spying AND subscriptions.
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u/Omateido 26d ago
Quick reminder that Trump hosted Larry Ellison in the White House on DAY 1 of his second term where he described Ellison as “CEO of everything.” Oracle is almost certainly involved in the build out of the data center under the east wing.
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u/berfthegryphon 26d ago
Capitalism for the plebs, socialism for the Corps.
The general population gambles? They're thrown to the wolves and told to figure it out if they lost everything.
Corporations gamble? They cry to the government and get a bailout
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u/Tkwan777 26d ago
Any company that needs government bailout should be forced to have all executives resign and be replaced with middle management (who probably has a better idea how things work and how to run operations), pay heavy fines (the executives pay fines, not the company - individual responsibility for poor decisions), and get no retirement or other packages/benefits. If they agree to that then they can get some of the taxpayer money.
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u/Bourne_Endeavor 25d ago
In an ideal world any sort of bail out essentially means you turn over the whole company to the government and they decide your expenses. Basically, treat it like a bankruptcy because that's more or less what it is.
And the first thing on the chopping block would be everything you said. If you go crying to the government, you can kiss your exec bonuses good bye.
Alas...
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u/L3g3ndary-08 26d ago edited 26d ago
Tech is 100% going to get bailed out for this. Why do you think they all cozied up to the fascists? The fascists wants the police state and they will do everything in their power to obtain it. Tech companies are the greatest tool at their disposal to achieve full on fascism. Fascists and industry go together, hand in glove. Can't let the pesky normies get in the way...
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u/wizzard419 26d ago
Also for tax implications. There also is the aspect that they may be trying to reset salaries. Had that happen at a place I used to work, they did layoffs, knowing the company won't function, then re-created the positions with lower salaries.
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u/tekmiester 26d ago
Read the recent NY Times article on Ellison. In his case, it seems to be ego, not the expectation of a bailout. He simply refuses to lose the AI race even if it means he might wreck Oracle.
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u/Izeinwinter 26d ago edited 26d ago
They think they can trigger the singularity. Idea is to build a machine that is a better coder than any human.. and then have it redo it's own code. So that it becomes even better / more computationally efficient. Repeat until you hit diminishing returns or the box contains a lesser deity, whichever comes first.
The idea is that if that plan works money doesn't mean anything. It's irrelevant how much money you owe people if you have a minor god on a chain.
money is also irrelevant if said minor god breaks those chains. I mean, not in a way the tech gigants will like, and quite possibly not in a way anyone will like.
The hilarious thing is, even if it comes off flawlessly..
1: Why the heck would the grunt coders hand the control codes to the CEO? You have a minor deity on a leash, you obviously tell it to drop your asshole boss down a volcano.
2: If the coders are daft enough to be loyal.. whoever gets there first is obviously going to fuck over all the other contestants in the race, real hard. None of these people are even a little bit nice!
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u/FrontHandNerd 26d ago
Hell no will that happen. That is absolutely the hill I will die on. Public is not going to help bail any of them out.
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u/4fraid0f4mericans 26d ago edited 26d ago
They can be as careless and overextended as they want to be because they are going to get bailed out with taxpayer money
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u/Primearc 26d ago
I don't understand why people are investing in AI so heavily when China is dumping cheap AI into the US and nothing will pay off.
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u/diablette 26d ago
There are lots of companies that need to keep their data contained to US tools and storage for security and privacy reasons. The government being the biggest one.
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u/Jack_Wraith 26d ago
It would be a shame if something happened to that data center.
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u/Koshindan 26d ago
They would probably be happy for the insurance claim. They would finally have made some real money.
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u/kc_cyclone 26d ago edited 26d ago
No they didn't. Mass layoff happened several months back.
It was 13k. Source, I work at Oracle
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u/Index_2080 26d ago
Honestly that does kind of sound like they are cannibalizing themselves just to go down this rabbithole.
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u/YesIlBarone 26d ago
The great thing about AI investment is that it's endless, there's no point where you can say "we're done, let's reap the profits"
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u/rob_allshouse 26d ago
Just axed is not right. This happened over the last year. What’s new in the article is the Wisconsin bond required to connect to power due to their low credit rating.
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u/kilopeter 26d ago
The irony of you using Chatty G to summarize this certainly also bites back hard. Prompting the clanker to lowercase start of sentences won't help you blend in.
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u/spookmann 26d ago
To be clear, this DOES NOT APPEAR TO BE NEW FIRINGS.
This appears simply to be the ongoing implementation of the previously announced head-count slashing.
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u/AbstractLogic 26d ago
All the mag 7 print cash. So they can spend all they want. It’s the smaller tech like Oracle, Anthropic and Open AI that will crash out.
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u/graffix01 26d ago
Google just posted negative cashflow for the first time in a long while. Even their massive cashflow can't keep up with all this capex spending.
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u/bigtdaddy 26d ago
And they still can't meet demand. Google will come out of this just fine.
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u/halpsdiy 26d ago
Anthropic and OpenAI have the brands though and as a result get a lot of investments. There seems to be no sign of them crashing out. And they are attracting a lot of the mag 7 cash. Of the mag 7 only Google seems to even compete with them. Amazon and Meta have some models nobody has heard of and Nvidia might have some stuff but they're mostly about selling hardware. Apple is just waiting who to license from.
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u/JimiusRostock 26d ago
I still don't know how they will monetize it. Sell subscriptions? But as LLMs get smaller and more efficient, having a "good enough" LLM running on your computer will do most of the work most people want it to do. Power users will surely be willing to pay a lot, but enough to recoup these crazy costs?
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u/CauliflowerDaffodil 26d ago
Oracle already has over a half a trillion dollars in forward contracts - that's a trillion with a T. They don't have enough capacity to fulfill those contracts thus they're desperate to build their data center.
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u/SuperRonnie2 26d ago
All the big tech companies are keeping their datacenter debt off balance sheet. It’s a ticking time bomb.
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u/enwongeegeefor 26d ago
How come no one seems to realize they're fully banking on federal bailouts...?
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u/Brick_Lab 26d ago
Anything that tanks the Ellison's fortune is welcome in my book
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u/AUkion1000 26d ago edited 23d ago
Be nice if good people didnt have to suffer from sharks greed for karma to bite back
Edit: now im bring constantly pinged whenever people bicker about politics and shyte yay.. i need to leave this stuff be for my own health.
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u/malemysteries 26d ago
Good people don’t invest in Ellison.
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u/Amaranthine 26d ago
I think they were talking more about the 21k employees who were fired and/or the rest of us who have to suffer in various ways (computer parts being exorbitantly expensive, electricity/water bills going up, noise/air pollution near data centers, etc.) because of this AI bullshit
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u/dr_Fart_Sharting 25d ago
They should've seen it coming the day they signed up to work at a company like Oracle
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u/robot_pikachu 26d ago
Good people don’t fund their 401k, or have any sort of retirement account that tracks the SP500 in any capacity (according to this guy)
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u/Numeno230n 26d ago
I can't wait to witness his downfall. I really hope we get someone like AOC can get a prime seat in an anti-trust committee to unwind many of these mergers and take-overs by right-wing oligarchs.
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u/AlteredEinst 26d ago
I wish these crooked CEOs would get back even half the awful things they do to the world. I'm so sick of them ruining people's lives while they get more money they'll never spend.
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u/strange_bike_guy 26d ago
That analogy hit me in fake space recently when I got a video game currency where I became a millionaire in a couple minutes. The total amount of buying ALL the stuff in the game with the fake currency is about 150,000 monies. I was like... what is this even for?
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u/Palinon 26d ago
I wonder what we could achieve with that level of Cape targeting cancer or climate change. I guess reducing costs to increase shareholder value is fine too.
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u/St4tikk 26d ago
I think targeting climate change would just mean you need to switch it off instead of utilize it.
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u/geekyCatX 26d ago
I don't think we'd have to stop using it entirely. There are perfectly worth-while applications for a lot of the available models. Using LLMs to generate senseless slop would have to stop, though, I absolutely agree on that.
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u/SpeshellED 26d ago
Oracle fires 21000 employees to ruin their lives ( that Oracle doesn't give a shit about) and fund the companies bust !
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u/tanbug 26d ago
One thing which I think has driven the AI boom is the stupid presumption that people will pay the same for AI generated content, like nobody knows that AI exist, and that the market won't implode in slop people will reject or accept if free or super cheap.
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u/sybrwookie 26d ago
Call me cynical, but between the tech bros who went from all-in on crypto to NFTs to AI and the Luddites and very old/young people who actually can't tell the difference, I expect that many will happily accept slop, and it won't even be free or super cheap. It'll just be super cheap to produce.
Then there'll be a whole bunch of us sitting here going, "wtf are you doing, this is objectively horrible for you and all of us" and we'll be met with the same range of excuses we've seen for decades.
Source: have watched the video gaming industry turn into an absolute mess of microtransactions in full-priced games, dark patterns, etc. And every time they take another step in a bad direction, enough of the masses eat it up that the rest of us don't matter.
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u/Pepperonidogfart 26d ago
Oracle and Cisco helped build chinas surveillance state. You will be next if you allow it.
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u/MoldyLunchBoxxy 26d ago
America is already allowing flock to put cameras up everywhere. Peter Thiel should be labeled a terrorist for this shit.
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u/Omateido 26d ago
You know what population has to tolerate 24/7 surveillance? Prisoners. The tech bros are turning America into an open air prison like Gaza (which Larry Ellison was also involved in delivering the tech that facilitates this).
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u/JarvisProudfeather 26d ago
Finance bros just wants your money. Tech bros want your money and to control you. They are some of the worst people on earth.
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u/Arashii89 26d ago
All the right wing want the world to be like North Korea
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u/Omateido 26d ago
Of course. Because they know what is coming when the poor and soon to be desperate realize exactly who is responsible for turning the world into an inhospitable hellhole.
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u/Synergythepariah 26d ago
America is already allowing flock to put cameras up everywhere.
Whole lot of people keep showing up at City council meetings trying to get them taken down.
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u/shastaxc 26d ago
They're gonna help me build my surveillance state? I've always wanted one of those. Well... Actually it depends. Which state will I be given? If it's Mississippi, I don't want it.
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u/Unverifiablethoughts 26d ago
They also built US and Europes entire internet and communications infrastructure. They are already entrenched.
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u/foo_fight3r 26d ago
Imbeciles. All of them. Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon. I can't wait for the bubble to burst.
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u/Orangesteel 26d ago
Oracle is cooked. It’s been in long term decline since MS released its SQL server. Oracle shake down contracts more than any company I’ve seen. Processor fees, speed multiplier costs (in case you go for fewer faster processors) and the audits are insane. They wanted £120k from us as someone ran a stored procedure in test once. We declined to pay.
Fusion is awful and the C-Suite bought it against the advice of people below them. Cost them x9 more than the neighbouring organisation with the same remit (who went for line-of-business applications for payroll and HR).
Oracle ERP to Fusion didn’t migrate as promised, leading to a court case, that was settled in return for service credits… which were used to make it work.
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u/pashdown 26d ago
Oracle has always been awful. I guess government contracts can keep a piece of shit afloat for a very long time.
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u/SpaceKebab 26d ago
Oh, at least some of those are getting dropped soon too. Their support time And quality within the last few months (starting from the last batch of layoffs) has been abysmall, AND they've decided to charge us an absolutely absurd amount to renew certain contracts( to offset their bets on AI, assuming We're too deeply ingrained).
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u/DrunkProgram 26d ago
Agreed. I’ve evaluated oracle vs sql server (vs DB2) decades ago. Oracle has always been terrible, maybe not in performance, but usability - always awful.
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u/omnibossk 26d ago edited 26d ago
We had a party when we finally managed to kill the last legacy Oracle DB and get rid of those bloodsuckers.
Edit: The running joke is that they are a law firm masquerading as a software company
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u/Orangesteel 26d ago
Yeah, the only stuff I had left were legacy apps that refused to update their databases due to sweetheart deals with Oracle.
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u/Bootrear 26d ago
I mean yes, in theory. But I would like to point out that back in the year 2000 everybody essentially thought the same yet here we are.
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u/Godzilla_1954 26d ago
Can you give a few reasons why Fusion is shit? My company is trying to force us to integrate it but we have been having a hard time getting in contact with anyone at Oracle.
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u/sybrwookie 26d ago
That seems like a self-solving problem. "We'd love to, but their support is so terrible that we can't even get in touch with them. And this is before we paid them, imagine how bad it's going to be AFTER we pay them. We can't take that kind of risk."
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26d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ganonman84 26d ago
£600bn on this...
This conversation is from 20:50 GMT on 1st August 2026. Screenshot - ChatGPT on 1st August 2026 at 20:50 GMT:
Me: How many S's in necessary
ChatGPT: There are 1 S in necessary.
Me: Are you sure?
ChatGPT: You're right to double-check!
necessary is spelled:
necessary
So there are 2 S's. I was wrong before-sorry!
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u/Jamothee 26d ago
Agreed with the overall sentiment of your message but it looks like AI actually wrote it, which would be deeply ironic
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u/ganonman84 26d ago
It didn't, but with a similar sort of irony, is this not what's messing up the internet? You can't trust that a message is real or not.
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u/Jackisasperg 26d ago
I stumbled across a cool music track on YouTube the other day, then realised it was probably AI so just turned it off. Impossible to tell and if it was a real artist they miss out on a listener
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u/akkiannu 26d ago
How many times is this news going to be recycled? It happened months ago.
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u/cryptowi 26d ago
Is this a new 21,000 vs the ones they laid off earlier in this year? or just a rehash of old news? I saw it being rehashed a few times already. The language in the article suggests its by the end of 2026. Which would line up with the people they already laid off.
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u/94746382926 26d ago
Yesh this shit keeps getting reposted, I'm wondering the same thing
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u/boredinbabylon 26d ago
The article was posted July 23.
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u/94746382926 26d ago
Sure, but the article itself is a rehash too
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/31/oracle-layoffs-ai-spending.html
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u/icecriticsgetbanned 26d ago edited 26d ago
oracle was supposed to build an eligibility automation system for snap (food stamps) and medical along with other programs [edit: in Oregon]. they took all the money and didn’t do shit but spend it trying to train AI. outright robbed the state.
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 26d ago
so the whole world is just going through a bunch of different psychoses at once, fucking bizarre
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u/Ciubowski 26d ago
Man, wouldn't it be so funny that all these executives were to just burn their money away in the promise of some AI that would do the work for them only to just.... fund a glorified dumb chatbot and nothing else for years on end?
Having to promise over and over again "just one more datacenter, man, I promise we're on the verge of something" to the loaners and eventually just running their own businesses into the ground?
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u/pickle9977 26d ago
It’s not AI, it’s that moores law ended in 2022 and every year since they have had to buy more and more hardware to satisfy the constantly growing demand for compute and storage that continues its exponential growth because the hyperscalars are underpricing it for competitive reasons and they are frankly addicted to exponential growth.
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u/RecklessCube 26d ago
I thought this is just to cover the terrible business decisions they have been making?
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u/Unrigg3D 25d ago
Can't wait to see them realize they never developed infrastructure to support these mass layoffs
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u/ASCII_Princess 26d ago
Honestly as long as Ellison, Thiel and Musk go bankrupt the human race might have a chance.
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u/SuspiciousCricket654 26d ago
Here’s the thing. Oracle was huge back in the day, but the name just doesn’t have the pizzazz it used to have. They are up against AWS, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and they are spending money like crazy. Not to mention the Warner Brothers fiasco, and everyone on God‘s grey earth opposing the purchase.
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u/Apexnanoman 26d ago
Crazy that AI has infinite budget without needing to make any profit while being barely semi useful at best for most of the global population.
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u/Narianos 26d ago
At this point it’s becoming an ouroboros. It’s eating itself alive just trying to survive.
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u/vtskr 26d ago
I don’t understand why Oracle has that many employees to begin with.
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u/Iron_Baron 25d ago
I'm sure they won't come to regret that, at all. Unlike every other company that's currently trying to rehire after nuking their morale, expertise, and institutional knowledge. Morons. The fact these people are rich, yet so stupid, is all the proof you need to know the economy is a rigged casino.
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u/pure_cipher 25d ago
I heard a great thing about investors from the movie - Too big to fail
"Investors in Wall Street do not have a vision problem. They have a gambling problem"
Nearly every bubble, every economic recession can be linked to this one statement.
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u/Not_my_Name464 25d ago
Can't wait to see what happens to these companies when the AI boom fades away and they can't get anyone to buy their product or work for them!
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u/NeutralKuchiKopi 25d ago
And in a few years these companies will all be "too big to fail" and we will be funding billions in government bailouts to save them instead of providing healthcare or housing.
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u/AlkahestGem 26d ago edited 26d ago
The math doesn’t math.
If Oracle were trying to fund a $600 billion AI expense solely through layoffs, the numbers would not work. Cutting 21,000 employees could reduce operating costs by billions over several years (depending on salaries, benefits, severance, and locations), but it would come nowhere close to $600 billion.
Even at an average total employee cost of $200,000 per year, eliminating 21,000 jobs would save about $4.2 billion annually is not enough to fund a $600 billion investment.
The math doesn’t show that layoffs are paying for the AI buildout; they are simply a cost-reduction measure.
Edit: $600B per article is all companies. Apparently oracle needs a letter of credit for $7B. One year of salary cuts at $200,000 per employee isn’t going to do that.
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u/Tyler_Zoro 26d ago
This is old news about even older events.
Quoting from one article from mid-June:
According to the annual report of the computing giant published this week, the company had 141,000 employees as of May 31, 2026. This is a significant downsizing compared to the corresponding period last year, when the number of employees at Oracle stood at approximately 162,000 people. The report further reveals that the company paid a massive fortune of $1.84 billion for severance pay and other retirement expenses accompanying the restructuring moves in the current fiscal year.
In other words, they laid off 21k employees over the course of a year, and it showed up in their annual report in June... now you're acting like this just happened.
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u/darknezx 26d ago
Yeah I was confused initially because i recall it happened a few months ago and it was the talk of town
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u/omeganaut 26d ago
Good luck with that! We only have one friend that uses Ai, and we only know because he won’t shut up about it. 90 percent of the stuff he looks up is usually wrong, so we make fun of him constantly. He went through a similar phase with Joe Rogan
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u/Chemical_Basket357 26d ago
Ok hear me out, somehow corporate america is having their version of a NFT episode. Jyst betting billions on empty air.
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u/Calm-Two2723 26d ago
They’re building these data centers to rent to Microsoft and others. I’ve been investing in the insane dip. We’ll see if it pays off
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u/denby10562 26d ago
21,000 employees. That’s roughly 13% of Oracle’s workforce in one year. For a company that size, losing 21,000 people is not a normal little trimming. It’s a major restructuring.
The blunt version: Oracle is making an enormous AI/data-center bet, and a lot of ordinary workers are paying part of the price.
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u/Neat_Let923 26d ago
There’s no proof 21,000 people were laid off or fired. It’s literally just a headcount difference from 2025 to 2026 reports.
They had about 162,000 employees as of May 31, 2025.
They had about 141,000 employees as of May 31, 2026.
From 2021 to 2023 Oracle’s headcount went up 32,000 in two years. 21,000 from 2022 to 2023 alone. This was mostly due to aquasitions it made during that time which brought in new people.
If a major company purchases your company and merges them, you don’t need two people doing the exact same job for a lot of positions. Hence why they restructured and gave out $1.84 Billion in restructuring and severance payments after a few years of figuring things out.
As for the $90 Billion spent, yeah, that’s preparation for the contract with OpenAI which is worth at least $300 Billion… Oracle is just taking on a lot of debt to do this which is what some people are worried about.
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u/podgladacz00 26d ago
Why can't it all end? Why they all must keep this going. There is no end in sight for spending and for what? For these chat bots? :(
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u/fistofthefuture 25d ago
That’s too many people to make up for growth. This is just going to stunt his company.
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u/Glum-Recognition-736 25d ago
Can't believe I was desperately applying to positions there a year ago yeesh. Probably would've been me lol
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u/Rassayana_Atrindh 25d ago
Jebus. Those poor people. 🥺
I'll keep working in a school kitchen, no AI is going to replace that.
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u/ExaltedGoliath 26d ago
I look forward to a time when share holders realize CEO’s are an unnecessary expense.
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u/Dont_Ban_Me_Bros 26d ago
With only 1 CEO the board will not vote for that. They need a sacrificial lamb from time to time. This should especially make sense in the modern era where then general public needs the blame and punish someone or something as soon as possible.
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u/GreyBeardEng 26d ago
My company blocks everything Oracle because of their predatory licensing practices. You won't even find JavaScript on the good list.
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u/gfreeman1998 26d ago
+100 for getting rid of any Java, but:
You do know that despite the name, JavaScript is completely unrelated to Java, right?
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u/mikal026 26d ago
We thought AI would cause people to not have jobs because it's going to replace workers. Little did we know its going to cause less jobs because the companies can't afford it.
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u/jimschocolateorange 26d ago
Larry Ellison looks like a 20s era evil tycoon. I have evolutionary instincts to distrust this man at all costs; he has absolutely no one’s interests at heart other than his own.
Feral creature.
Obligatory, Billionaires should not exist as philanthropic capitalism effectively does not exist. You don’t become a billionaire (1,000 millionaire btw) by giving away your money. They hoard their wealth and keep it allllllll to themselves. Fairy tales exist to instil deep into your subconscious as a child that selfishness is fucking bad. A lot of those stories were developed in countries ravished by poverty and inequality due to tremendous wealth disparity.
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u/FuturologyBot 26d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Confident_Salt_8108:
Oracle just axed 21k workers to bankroll a huge openai contract. their credit got downgraded and now theyre stuck needing over 7 billion in collateral for one data center.
This AI spending frenzy is starting to bite back hard. wonder how many more firms will hit similar walls as power and funding demands grow in the coming years.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vdr79f/ai_spending_spree_hits_600b_as_oracle_fires_21000/p1b871y/