Wiped Out by AI: How Oracle's Record-Breaking Profits Cost 30,000 Departing Workers Their Severance and Stock

Oracle Corp is now wrapping up its biggest downsizing on record, with thousands of departures scheduled to take effect between 1 June and 15 June.

Once these final exit dates pass, the tech giant will have cut roughly 18% of its global headcount—amounting to a staggering 30,000 lost jobs.

Record Layoffs Meet Surging Profits

The massive staff cuts stand in stark contrast to Oracle's performance just weeks earlier, when the company posted strong financial results. Driven by surging cloud sales and a rapidly expanding artificial intelligence division, the business had actually managed to beat market expectations.

A Tech Times report highlights a remarkably strong performance for Oracle in its third fiscal quarter of 2026, with major expansions recorded across multiple core operations. Total revenue jumped 22% compared to the previous year to reach $17.2 billion (£12.78 billion), propelled largely by a 44% surge in cloud sales, which, at $8.9 billion (£6.62 billion), now generates more than half of the company's overall intake.

Momentum proved even stronger across the firm's artificial intelligence ventures, where Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's AI sector saw intake skyrocket by 243%, alongside an exceptional 531% surge in multi-cloud database returns. These gains helped push the company's GAAP net income to a substantial $3.7 billion (£2.75 billion) for the three months.

Financing the Massive AI Pivot

Management has not kept the strategy driving these sweeping changes under wraps. According to the Tech Times report, Oracle has earmarked roughly $50 billion (£37.16 billion) for capital investment during the 2026 fiscal year, prioritising the construction of AI data centres and the rapid expansion of its infrastructure networks.

Oracle is also playing a pivotal role in Stargate, the massive artificial intelligence infrastructure initiative backed by OpenAI and SoftBank. Senior management has framed the job cuts as a deliberate pivot, moving funding away from staff-heavy departments so the business can pour its resources directly into these core AI developments.

Future commitments to the company have also soared, with backlogged orders climbing 325% over the year to hit a monumental $553 billion (£411.03 billion), driven by an appetite for multi-year AI infrastructure deals. Yet, as the Tech Times report notes, Oracle is balancing this pipeline against roughly $135 billion (£100.34 billion) in outstanding loans and debt, making the tight regulation of its cash reserves a critical element of its current approach.

Severance Disputes and Lost Equity

As their final days at the firm arrive, departing workers are carefully weighing up their exit packages and deciding whether to accept the terms. Oracle has structured its payouts around length of service, granting four weeks of basic salary for the first year on the job, plus an extra week for each additional year completed, up to a 26-week limit.

To unlock these benefits, workers are required to sign a waiver giving up their right to take legal action against the firm. Equity has also emerged as a major flashpoint for several employees. Since Oracle refused to speed up the vesting schedule for restricted stock units, any unvested shares were simply wiped out the moment a worker left the company.

In one particularly severe case, a long-serving staff member reportedly missed out on roughly $1 million (£0.74 million) in unvested shares that were only a few months away from paying out.

Staff Petition and WARN Act Complications

Internal pushback has grown, with staff pointing out that Oracle's terms fall short of the redundancy packages provided by rival tech firms. A coalition of at least 90 affected employees went as far as signing a petition to demand a better deal, citing the more generous payouts, medical benefits, and share-vesting arrangements seen at companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Cloudflare.

However, the efforts failed to move management, with Oracle firmly telling staff that the original terms of the package will stand.

The company's handling of the federal WARN Act notice period has become another major point of contention. To meet legal requirements, Oracle placed affected staff on 60 days of paid administrative leave leading up to their final dates.

However, the report points out that the firm counted this notice period toward the actual redundancy payout rather than offering it as a separate benefit. As a result, the two-month notice window effectively swallowed up most—or even all—of the severance cash some workers expected to receive.

Further complications arose over Oracle's decision to label a large portion of its staff as remote workers, a detail that could impact their legal standing, given that WARN Act safeguards are heavily tied to the total number of job losses at a specific corporate site.

Deep Cuts Hit Oracle Health

The brunt of the job cuts hit Oracle Health, the business unit formed after the company's massive $28.3 billion (£21.04 billion) acquisition of Cerner. According to the Tech Times report, the division bore an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 of the total departures.

These particular losses have triggered widespread concern, given that the division anchors critical health systems and high-profile government contracts—most notably the Department of Veterans Affairs' troubled electronic health records rollout.

The scale of the downsizing has already drawn sharp scrutiny from both lawmakers and healthcare groups, who question whether a severely diminished workforce can actually deliver on these massive commitments.