The company disclosed $1.84 billion in severance costs in its SEC filing as it redirects spending toward data centers and compute infrastructure, amid a broader AI capital spending boom.
Oracle said roughly 21,000 employees were laid off, about 13% of its global workforce, leaving 141,000 staff as of its latest fiscal year. The company tied the cuts in its SEC 10-K filing to AI deployment and a broad restructuring aimed at channeling more money into data centers and compute infrastructure. Oracle said the layoffs carried $1.84 billion in severance costs. The move comes as Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are projected to spend a combined $600 billion to $650 billion on AI-related capital expenditures in 2026, underscoring how investment in chips, servers and cooling systems is reshaping corporate budgets. Oracle has also reportedly secured a $300 billion contract with OpenAI for AI computing capacity, a deal that, if realized near that scale, would make it a major infrastructure provider for generative AI. The development also has implications for crypto-adjacent infrastructure: Bitcoin miners have been shifting parts of their operations into AI hosting and high-performance computing, and the surge in AI spending is competing for power, land and cooling resources used by mining facilities.