Oracle has cut around 21,000 roles worldwide over the past year, a stark sign of how quickly artificial intelligence is reshaping the cost base of the world’s largest technology firms, the US software and cloud computing giant’s latest annual report shows.
The company employed roughly 141,000 full-time staff as of 31 May 2026, down from about 162,000 a year earlier, according to Reuters. The reduction amounts to roughly 13 per cent of its global workforce.
In unusually candid language, Oracle told investors that the “deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce”. The admission, buried in the firm’s annual filing, makes Oracle one of the few blue-chip employers to explicitly link headcount cuts to automation rather than the usual corporate shorthand of “efficiency” or “streamlining”.
The cuts have not come cheap. Oracle said it booked about $1.8bn (£1.36bn) in severance and other restructuring costs over the year, nearly five times the $374m it spent the year before. The figures are set out in the company’s annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The bulk of the reductions appear to have landed in April, when senior employees began posting online about “significant” job losses, though the full scale only became clear once the annual report was published.
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