Oracle laid off thousands of employees even as the company’s revenues rise in a bid to increase its investment in artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure. The move is part of a broader pattern now visible across big technology firms.
More than 75 technology companies have cut nearly 41,500 jobs so far in 2026, according to Layoffs.fyi, as companies redirect resources towards AI, cloud capacity and automation.
Meta last week laid off 700 employees across multiple teams. Amazon has removed roughly 16,000 corporate and technical roles, including jobs in its cloud division AWS, while Atlassian cut about 1,600 employees, or nearly 10% of its workforce, to focus more on AI products and enterprise growth.
Oracle began layoffs this week, affecting at least 20,000-30,000 employees globally, including nearly 12,000 in India, as it sharply increases spending on AI infrastructure to compete with rivals such as Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet.
In a filing for March, the company said restructuring costs for fiscal 2026 could reach as much as $2.1 billion, driven largely by severance and related expenses. The layoffs come even as Oracle’s financial performance remains strong. The company recently beat quarterly earnings estimates, reporting $17.19 billion in revenue, and said demand from the AI data-centre boom is expected to support growth through at least 2027.
What links these layoffs is not weak demand but an industry-wide shift in spending.
Oracle is reportedly planning to raise as much as $50 billion through debt and equity to expand cloud and AI data centre capabilities for major customers, including Nvidia, Meta Platforms and OpenAI.
That shift is changing how companies think about costs.
Global Tech Spending
Global technology spending is set to rise sharply in 2026, driven largely by artificial intelligence infrastructure, cloud capacity and data centre expansion.
According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is projected to reach $6.15 trillion in 2026, up 10.8% from $5.55 trillion in 2025. This follows an earlier increase of 7.9% in 2025, when global IT spending was estimated at $5.43 trillion.
AI-specific spending is growing even faster. Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending at $2.52 trillion in 2026, a 44% increase from 2025. A large part of this is linked to infrastructure, with AI foundations and AI-optimised servers alone adding $401 billion in fresh spending this year.