Oracle stock jumps 5% after sweeping layoffs and AI pivot

Software giant Oracle on Tuesday started laying off workers as it looks to rein in costs and double down on artificial intelligence.

On LinkedIn, Oracle employees, including software engineers, account executives and program managers, shared publicly that they were affected by a mass layoff at the company and were looking for new jobs.

Oracle was founded in California, but moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in 2020.

The company, which sells software and other services to help businesses manage and store data, hasn't said publicly how many jobs were cut. CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Oracle was slashing thousands of workers. As of May 2025, Oracle had 162,000 workers.

Oracle has offices throughout the world, including in California in Irvine, Santa Monica, Redwood City and Santa Clara. It's unclear if the mass layoff also affected workers in California. Oracle declined to comment.

The company is the latest tech firm to shed workers as it focuses more heavily on AI. Meta, Block, Amazon, Salesforce and other tech giants have continued to lay off their workers even as they hire for other roles and spend billions of dollars on AI data centers and products.

U.S.-based tech employers announced more than 33,000 job cuts from January to February, up 51% compared with the same period last year, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in March.

Oracle's stock price jumped more than 5% on Tuesday to $146.92 per share following reports of the company's job cuts.

Since January, Oracle's shares have dropped more than 24%. Oracle has benefited from the AI boom but investors have been wary about how much the company is spending. Oracle also competes against Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and others for business customers.

In February, Oracle said it would raise up to $50 billion through debt and equity to expand its cloud infrastructure business, which includes customers such as AMD, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI and xAI.