The AI-related layoffs don’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.
Oracle is reportedly gearing up for yet another round of job cuts, with some estimates suggesting as many as 10,000 positions could be eliminated worldwide, and roughly 3,000 of those in India, according to multiple reports citing people familiar with the company’s plans. If confirmed, this would be Oracle’s second major layoff wave of 2026, coming just months after the company cut an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 jobs globally in March and April, with India among the hardest-hit markets in that round as well.
Oracle has not officially confirmed the fresh round of cuts. The company has stayed largely silent on both the earlier layoffs and the ones now being reported, a pattern that has become familiar to employees who say they’ve learned about their own job losses through early-morning termination emails rather than any formal company communication.
What We Know So Far
Oracle’s full-time headcount had already fallen to around 141,000 as of May 31, 2026, down from about 162,000 a year earlier, reflecting the scale of the March-April cuts. Any additional reduction of 10,000 employees would mark another significant contraction for a company that, until recently, had been on a hiring spree to staff its rapidly expanding cloud and AI infrastructure business.
Oracle set aside roughly $2.1 billion for restructuring in fiscal 2026, with about $1.8 billion of that already recorded as expenses tied to the earlier layoffs. Whether a similar severance framework, reportedly including extended pay and healthcare coverage, would apply to this next round remains unclear.
For India specifically, the country has consistently been one of the largest concentrations of Oracle staff outside the US, and previous rounds of cuts this year affected teams across cloud, database, sales, support, and Oracle Health divisions. Employees on platforms like Blind and LinkedIn have described entire teams being invited to “business update” calls that turned out to be termination notices, with system access cut within minutes.
The AI Angle: Why This Keeps Happening
The layoffs are impossible to separate from Oracle’s aggressive, and expensive, pivot into AI infrastructure. In its most recent annual filing, Oracle explicitly acknowledged that the adoption and deployment of AI technologies have already resulted in workforce reductions, and that this could lead to further cuts, a rare instance of a large tech company stating the connection outright rather than leaving it to analysts to infer.
The numbers explain why. Oracle’s capital expenditure for fiscal 2026 climbed to roughly $50 billion, tens of billions more than the company had originally guided Wall Street to expect, driven almost entirely by the buildout of AI data centers. The company’s remaining performance obligations, essentially contracted future revenue, have swelled into the hundreds of billions of dollars, fuelled in large part by a massive multi-year compute deal with OpenAI and rapid growth in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which alone grew 77% in fiscal 2026 to $18.1 billion in revenue.
This is the paradox at the centre of Oracle’s story right now: business is booming, revenue is growing at a healthy clip, and the company’s AI order book keeps getting bigger every quarter, yet Oracle still can’t comfortably fund the physical infrastructure, chips, and data centers needed to deliver on those AI contracts without freeing up billions of dollars elsewhere. Analysts at TD Cowen estimated that the earlier round of layoffs alone could free up $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow, cash that gets redirected straight into building out compute capacity rather than retaining headcount in legacy business lines.
Oracle has also pointed to a second, more direct AI effect: the technology itself changing how much human labour is needed to do the work. The company has said that AI coding tools are letting it restructure engineering into smaller teams that can ship more software with fewer people, a justification that mirrors what several other large tech employers have said this year as they trim headcount even while posting strong earnings. Traditional business units not directly tied to AI initiatives have reportedly faced the deepest cuts, while investment continues to flow toward AI-linked infrastructure and cloud roles.
For India, this creates a particularly sharp trade-off. The country has long been positioned as a cost-efficient hub for Oracle’s global delivery and engineering operations, but that same cost logic appears to be working against it now: it is comparatively cheaper, and administratively simpler, for Oracle to cut thousands of roles in India than to make equivalent cuts in the US or Europe, even as the company continues to talk up India as a strategic market.
What’s Next
Markets have already started reacting to the uncertainty. Oracle’s stock closed lower at the end of August and slipped further in premarket trading, as investors weigh the tension between the company’s blockbuster AI backlog and the mounting cost of building it out. Oracle’s next earnings update, expected in mid-September, will likely be the moment the company either confirms these reported cuts or offers more clarity on how it plans to balance AI spending with its workforce.
Until then, employees in India and elsewhere are left watching for the same kind of early-morning email that defined Oracle’s last layoff round, uncertain whether their team will be the one restructured next in the name of AI.