NYSE
- Oracle laid off staff in March. A new filing shows its global head count fell by 21,000 over the last year.
- Costs associated with restructuring increased by $1.5 billion over the past year, up 391%.
- Oracle has been ramping up data spending during the AI boom.
Oracle’s head count has been shrinking as it made layoffs to cut costs — and now there’s a number behind its reduction.
A filing published Monday showed that its global workforce declined by 21,000 between May 2025 and May 2026. The number includes both attrition and layoffs.
Oracle employed around 141,000 employees worldwide as of May 31, 2026, the filing said.
Compared with the numbers reported in its 2025 filing, the company shed 9,000 jobs in the US and 12,000 jobs internationally.
Restructuring and other expenses — which consist of costs for employee severance, contract termination, and other exit activity — increased by 391% from $374 million to about $1.8 billion over the last year, Oracle said in the filing.
Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.
In March, the company began laying off staff but did not confirm the scale of the cuts.
The notification email sent to the laid-off employees, which Business Insider exclusively obtained, said the decision to eliminate roles was made “after careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs” and was part of “broader organizational change.”
According to LinkedIn posts from laid-off employees, the cuts affected staff across Oracle Health, Sales, Cloud, Customer Success, and NetSuite.
The reduction in head count comes as Oracle invests heavily in data center infrastructure while looking for ways to rein in costs. Oracle’s stock is down about 15% over the last year.
In March, Oracle executives told investors not to worry about its significant data center spending because the company is “very, very good” at cost-cutting.
In January, Business Insider reported that the company was struggling to find financing for Stargate, its $500 billion data center initiative with OpenAI. In February, Oracle announced a $50 billion debt raise to help fund its infrastructure buildout.
Across the tech industry, major companies have been reducing their workforces. Many bosses have cited AI in their layoff notifications.
In January, Amazon said it would slash about 16,000 corporate roles, months after cutting 14,000 employees. Meta axed around 8,000 staffers in May, and Dell’s recent 10-K filing showed that employee numbers have fallen by 36,000 over the last three years, a 27% decline in head count.
