The company laid off 491 Seattle workers, part of wider cuts as it splurges on artificial intelligence kit while its share price sinks this year.
Business Insider reported that Oracle is chopping thousands of jobs as it faces pressure from the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street to cut costs while shovelling billions into AI infrastructure such as data centres.
Oracle is hardly the only tech outfit throwing silly money at capital expenditure, but it has the worst-performing stock among the big names this year as it borrows to fund its AI push.
Oracle shares jumped six per cent after news of the layoff, yet they are still down nearly 25 per cent for the year.
The Seattle cuts mostly hit staff at two Oracle offices in downtown Seattle, according to a state regulatory filing on Tuesday, with a handful marked as remote.
Those offices at 1301 Second Ave and 2025 Fifth Ave are not closing, Oracle told the state in the same filing.
Even so, Oracle’s Seattle-area headcount and office sprawl are shrinking, with 3,900 employees last year, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.
Since then, Oracle has laid off 757 Seattle-area employees, a total that includes yesterday’s cuts.
Oracle ditched its downtown Bellevue office in 2024 and in 2023 it shed about 100,000 square feet of space at 2025 Fifth Ave, the Century Square tower.
It is the latest in a line of name-trimming bodies, while AI costs loom, with Meta confirming hundreds of cuts last week after deeper cuts at Reality Labs.
Microsoft and Amazon have collectively shed thousands of jobs during the past year, with AI-related capital spending sitting in the background like a permanent invoice.
Oracle’s latest round landed about a week after US president Donald Trump put Oracle founder and chief technical officer Larry Ellison on a technology council to advise on AI and tech policy.
