Oracle plans to cut thousands of jobs as data center costs rise, Bloomberg News reports

March 5 (Reuters) – Enterprise software company Oracle (ORCL.N)opens new tab The company is planning to cut thousands of jobs as it faces a cash crunch due to a massive AI data center expansion effort, Bloomberg News reported Thursday.

Oracle, long a small contender in the cloud market, has emerged as a major player in the computing power rental business over the past year, thanks to its $300 billion deal with OpenAI.

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But investors have become concerned about how the data center expansion needed to serve OpenAI and other customers, including Elon Musk’s XAI and Meta (META.O), will be financed.opens new tab.
In December, the company said it expected capital spending for fiscal 2026 to be $15 billion more than the $35 billion figure it had estimated during its first-quarter earnings call.

The layoffs will impact Oracle’s divisions and could be implemented as soon as this month, the Bloomberg report said, citing people familiar with the matter. Some of the cuts will be aimed at job categories that the company expects will be reduced due to AI.

According to Bloomberg, the planned cuts are expected to be more extensive than Oracle’s normal rolling job cuts.

This week, Oracle announced internally that it would review a number of open job listings in its cloud division, effectively slowing or stopping the hiring process, the report said.

Oracle declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

The company had about 162,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2025, according to annual filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The software company, headed by billionaire Larry Ellison, in February outlined plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion this year to expand its cloud infrastructure, raising investor concerns about its growing debt load.

Oracle will report third-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Its shares fell more than 15% last year after its December results revealed it had burned through nearly $10 billion of cash in the first half of the financial year.

Reporting by Jubi Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Alan Barona

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