Oracle at 6 a.m. sends an email to lay off thousands of employees, aiming to free up billions of dollars for the AI data center.

According to 1M AI News monitoring, Oracle launched a large-scale round of layoffs on Tuesday. CNBC, citing two people familiar with the matter, confirmed that the layoffs involve several thousand people; one Oracle employee told the BBC that, based on changes in the number of active users on the company’s internal Slack, about 10,000 people have been affected. In a January estimate this year, TD Cowen analyst projected that reducing 20,000 to 30,000 workers at Oracle could generate an incremental free cash flow of $8 billion to $10 billion. As of May 2025, Oracle has about 162,000 employees worldwide.

Several employees described the layoff process on social media: at 6:00 a.m. (Eastern Time), an email notifying recipients of their termination, signed “Oracle Leadership,” arrived in their inbox, informing them that it was the last working day of the day, with no prior warning from supervisors or HR. After signing the DocuSign separation documents, employees would receive one month of severance pay; unvested restricted stock units were immediately forfeited. Michael Shepherd, a senior manager at Oracle, posted on LinkedIn, saying that those affected include senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, project managers, and technical experts, and that the layoffs are not related to performance.

The layoffs directly serve Oracle’s aggressive investment in AI infrastructure. The company announced in January that it plans to use $50 billion through debt and equity financing for data center construction, and it is also a participant in the Stargate plan (a partnership with OpenAI and SoftBank, with a total investment of $500 billion). Co-CEO Clayton Magouyrk said on this month’s earnings call that, “Demand for AI infrastructure—whether GPUs or CPUs—continues to outstrip supply,” and the contract value that the company is awaiting confirmation for has already reached $553 billion. Oracle’s share price is down 25% this year, underperforming all major tech companies, but on the day the layoff news was released, the stock rebounded by about 5%. Oracle declined to comment.