Oracle Axes Up to 30,000 Jobs in Brutal Shift Towards AI and Data Centres
American tech giant Oracle has drastically reduced its workforce over the past month, quietly letting go of up to 30,000 employees.
According to a report by Time, this massive culling is driven by a major shift in corporate policy as the company realigns its focus towards artificial intelligence (AI) development and the construction of new data centres.
The wave of redundancies has not spared the company’s most experienced talent, with veterans holding decades of tenure finding themselves out of work. In a harsh irony, many of these dismissed specialists spent their recent months training the very AI systems they feared would eventually make them obsolete.
Beyond the sudden loss of their salaries, former staff have missed out on substantial financial compensation. Restricted stock units (RSUs) that were scheduled to vest have simply evaporated.
The manner of the dismissals has drawn heavy criticism. Several employees discovered they had been sacked while they were off sick or away on annual holiday. Workers are actively complaining about inadequate redundancy packages, the immediate stripping of their medical insurance and the severe threat of deportation hanging over international staff on working visas.
Oracle boss Larry Ellison has heavily defended the new direction, publicly asserting that neural networks are now writing code instead of human developers. To support this vision, the corporation is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, a move it acknowledges will likely trigger financial losses in the immediate future.
However, the reality on the ground appears less seamless than the boardroom vision. Former staff members argue that the newly implemented AI tools are frequently defective. Rather than replacing human effort, these algorithms often exacerbate workloads by forcing employees to clean up the mistakes generated by the technology.
In the wake of the mass dismissals, more than 600 former Oracle workers have signed an open letter demanding improved severance conditions. Despite the growing backlash, the company has completely refused to enter into collective discussions to address their grievances.
