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Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat
- onlyrealcuzzo 7mo agoWe will continue to be told this is because AI is driving efficiency instead of that it's driving CapEx and investors won't tolerate FCF collapsing.
- Ancalagon 7mo agoEveryone is holding their breath praying AGI either will, or will not, come before the chickens come home to roost.
- dboreham 7mo agoNot sure that makes sense. As amazing a technical feat as AGI will be, does it follow that s.tons of money will immediately be made? That's not really how humans act, historically. Any migration to new technology takes years, decades. There are still steam engines pulling revenue service trains.
- Ancalagon 7mo agoYes - if AGI is made, nearly immediately every knowledge worker’s labor value goes to zero over night. This may or may not include AI researchers.
- fileeditview 7mo agoYou are assuming that the AGI service is very cheap..
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoAnd probably not much longer after that, the bloodshed
- Ancalagon 7mo agoUnless the benefits of AI get communalized (UBI, or some other form of sharing), ya.
- joquarky 7mo agoHow would that work? Taxes are already full of perverse incentives. Certainly anything resembling UBI will be just as bad.
- Ancalagon 7mo agoYou’re not wrong - I was just giving that as an example but not saying it’s the right thing to do.
- bluefirebrand 7mo agoI don't think there is any compelling reason to believe this will actually happen
- delusional 7mo agoThat seems like a wrong economic theory to me. The economy is based on differential of value. I can make furniture, so it's worth less to me than it is to you. Therefore we can trade. That's what supply/demand is. If AGI somehow exists, then the value of intelligence drops to zero for both of us, there's nothing to trade. AGI would not make knowledge work valueless, it would move all the knowledge work value to the AGI companies.
- hackable_sand 7mo agoCan you guys just say the quiet part out loud? That you want slaves. You want slaves. This is what you are asking for. Unless you're paying the AGI? Then why not just... pay a human that is already present? Much more efficient.
- Ancalagon 7mo agoNot sure if you’re insinuating that I’m one of the capitalists? I’m not, that’s why I’m saying it out loud. I believe capitalism’s relationship with labor will need to fundamentally change if AGI and robotics takeover. I don’t know what that looks like but obviously the current capitalist overlords want everything to stay the same - just for them to have more power/money.
- energy123 7mo agoIt will drive capital into data centers, which is good for Oracle.
- rando77 7mo agoOr maybe it won't. If it can be made efficient like humans it might be at the edge mainly.
- hackable_sand 7mo agoWhat is this "everyone" running from?
- Ancalagon 7mo agoCollapse of return on investment
- alephnerd 7mo agoIn Oracle's case this is part of their larger Oracle Cloud strategy - once you remove the scooby doo monster mask you end up finding much of Oracle's AI spend was connected with their larger bet on Oracle Cloud and becoming a tier 1 hyperscaler. This is why they landed one of the mega cybersecurity companies (the one who's name starts with C) as well as a globally distributed ridesharing businesses with sweetheart terms. Oracle Cloud already represents 50% of Oracle's total revenue, and the AI story helps them justify that capex needed to fund their pivot into becoming a hyperscaler.
- bdangubic 7mo agodon’t forget that they will probably hire thousands off-shore
- onlyrealcuzzo 7mo agoMaybe - but the larger issue is FCF - and you can't hire that many without it showing up on FCF.
- bdangubic 7mo agowhy would they try to hide it? no other company does :)
- onlyrealcuzzo 7mo agoYou must not understand what FCF is. If you're cutting headcount STRICTLY to juice FCF, you cannot spend money offshore without hitting FCF.
- bdangubic 7mo agoyou can if you are paying pennies on the dollar :)
- hshdhdhj4444 7mo agoI strongly believe AI will drive efficiency. I’m less certain about whether that’s already happening or will happen in the future and when in the future. However, I’ve already seen a CTO of a F100 company explicitly state that whether AI is driving efficiency or not, the capital investment, and more importantly, the promises of efficiency to investors will mean some people will be let go. Efficiency is output/input. The input is easy to measure. It’s cost and in this particular case salaries. Output is a lot harder to measure, which means it can be fudged easily. So you cut the easily measurable inputs and inflate the easily manipulable output. One could imagine the reverse would also be possible, where you maintain inputs but inflate the output, but there is an asymmetry where investors will reward you for cutting costs even if there are no efficiency advantages that makes cutting inputs more sellable than inflating outputs.
- boringg 7mo agoI think we wont know until the true costs for ai are revealed. Right now were still in the vc growth above all things part of the cost curve. It will get worse quality as revenue demands increase (as all products suffer). It will be another dependency for all companies to bear. Hopefully significant gains for humanity, tbd
- pipo234 7mo ago> Output is a lot harder to measure, which means it can be fudged easily. First and foremost, this is about Oracle. For the short period I worked there, my impression about culture and tech was: mediocre. Not excellent, not poor but just a around average. Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially? I believe it's being ruthless to customers, employees and suppliers combined with cooking the financials. Which bring me to your remark about output being difficult to measure. Imho Oracle had been exceptionally good at manipulating and obfuscating their output. And this was true long before AI came to the scene.
- oxag3n 7mo ago> Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially? Tons of mediocre enterprise software is built on Oracle DB. Why enterprises are vendor locked-in? There are very few large enterprise players in every industry that implement all kind of ISO, standards, got an army of business analysts to generate million of requirement pages. Any new player must fight against that artificially overblown legacy systems, design and prove migration process is possible etc. Here are just a bunch of industries my family/friends worked in and had first hand experience with these legacy systems - Airline (PSS), Banking, Healthcare, Hotel, Telecom.
- jollyllama 7mo agoExcept we're not, in this case. Oracle is not hiding the fact that the cuts are due to rising costs and expenses, rather than actualized efficiency gains. This is in contrast to everyone else, ex. Dorsey's block, who are putting a brave face on cuts, saying it's simply due to efficiency gains from AI. The question is: why are their statements being taken at face value?
- thinkingkong 7mo agoThis article is over a month old. Why is it being shared now? Its also posted on reddit where it has some lift.
- alephnerd 7mo ago[flagged]
- Etheryte 7mo agoYou don't have to share only new things, often people share things that are many years old too and that's also fine.
- kshacker 7mo agoNot when the tone is that tomorrow worlds going to reboot or something similar
- SoftTalker 7mo agoThat's just all news these days. Gotta get the virals.
- paulddraper 7mo agoRarely are they speculative news events.
- ramon156 7mo agoI'd missed this last month, so im glad its shared
- fishcrackers 7mo ago[dead]
- hedora 7mo agoAnd, with this, the economic contagion begins. Before this step, we had non-existent money loaned to build datacenters powered by non-existent power infrastructure to support future load that will never exist, with guaranteed revenue from companies that do not, and will never be able to pay. Previously, this was propped up with circular revenue and investment. Now it's going to be propped up by dismantling the US tech industry. This does not end well.
- PeterStuer 7mo agoThe future load might definitely exist, but will it at a sustainable pricepoint?
- arlcode 7mo agoAnd will it be by 2030 or ten years later
- b112 7mo agoIf it is 2030, compute and software will vastly reduce requirements. Nvidia has so much cash for R&D. You can bet they now have immense optimization and improvements in the pipeline, but why would they release anything groundbreaking right now? There are no real competitors on their heels. As Intel did for decades, they will likely dole out improvements, only when necessary to remain ahead. By 2030, I expect 10x improvement. We're also seeing stunning optimizations in trained models. I imagine desktops running many of these local by 2030, even phones. Will we need even 1/10 the datacenters for LLM in 2030? Certainly, privacy concerns are a thing.
- k32k 7mo agoWhen I read this comment all I see is: LLM at the edge - or close to it - will become available. And whoever provides the best eco-system across digital lifestyle and business wins. Oh... Apple? lol. Well that'd be funny wouldn't it. Oh and dont forget Apple got rid of its reliance on Intel too. No reason why this can't happen again.
- throwaway27448 7mo agoWhy is oracle invested in ai at all? It seems entirely unrelated to the value they offer.
- stefan_ 7mo agoThey are a software vendor, and the theory goes all the software vendors will go away, because AI will just build your business software on the fly. So they are trying to "become AI"! Also Oracle is owned by Larry Ellison and hes in a competition with the other tech bros.
- beng-nl 7mo agoOracle is also OCI, oracle cloud initiative. My understanding/impression is that oracle is betting the company on its success.
- stefan_ 7mo agoWell, I'm sure they were when "cloud" was the latest buzzword in public company reporting. Now that its AI I'm sure the next quarterly will show massive (fabricated by reshuffling) growth in their AI initiative.
- intrasight 7mo ago> because AI will just build your business software No. AI will BE your business software
- isodev 7mo agoWhat value does Oracle offer?
- rvz 7mo agoThey will, not may. I think you are about to see what post-AGI economics really looks like and it is not good at all. So-called "AGI" has been hijacked and it isn't what you think it is.
- AnimalMuppet 7mo agoDo tell. What is AGI?
- rvz 7mo agoDepends on who you ask.
- werrq 7mo agoThis topic is in mainstream news again, too: https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-plans-thousands-job-cuts-data-center-costs-rise-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-03-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-plans-thousands-job-... Ellison has borrowed money against $80 billion of his shares: https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-plans-thousands-job-cuts-data-center-costs-rise-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-03-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-plans-thousands-job-... Banks are getting nervous. The reaction of a psychopath would be to fire people so Ellison can pursue his AI fever dreams. Due to abnormal wealth concentration and total lack of common sense there is nothing to stop anyone should they go senile or insane. The risk for the entire economy and the job market is immense.
- icfly2 7mo agoThis is so dumb. But we’ll all end up with cheap LLMs I guess and maybe great cloud gaming.
- cubefox 7mo agoAccording to its website, Oracle has 162,000 employees. Cutting 30k people would be 18.5% of its workforce. That's huge.
- kelipso 7mo agoWith the ASICs being so efficient at inference, I’m getting the feeling even the infrastructure investments are going to be severely outdated in a couple of years..
- cubefox 7mo agoASICs only work for very small and heavily quantized models. Moreover, they are fixed function hardware, so whenever you have a new model, you have to throw the current chips away and design and buy new ones. That's like buying a new CPU every time a new OS version comes out.
- surfmike 7mo agoGoogle’s training and running all their stuff on ASICs, seems to be working out well.
- cubefox 7mo agoTPUs are not ASICs if they can execute arbitrary models.
- AdamN 7mo agoForgive my ignorance but wouldn't a TPU be a kind of ASIC where the application is model inference? The TPU Wikipedia article also says it's an ASIC - we should update it if it's wrong.
- cubefox 7mo agoIn the limit, even a CPU could be called an ASIC because certain algorithmic operations (ALU etc) are implemented in hardware. CPU/ASIC are really poles of a gradient, with a CPU implementing very little in hardware and most in software, while an ASIC has very little software and lots of hardware. A TPU is presumably in between. I would argue however that it is closer to a GPU than to a full-blown ASIC, because the weights are stored in memory only, making them software.
- bearjaws 7mo agoThe economy is going to go into a deep recession for years with the current economic environment. There will be nobody left to spend money, just increasing corporate and ultra high wealth spend. The rest will be left with food and water. We are destroying currently valuable jobs to allocate resources to electricity and silicon, concentrating wealth into 10 companies pockets. I don't know what comes after, but when you combine this with the Iran war it's going to be closer to economic depression.
- bequanna 7mo ago> I don't know what comes after, but when you combine this with the Iran war it's going to be closer to economic depression. I follow your extrapolation in the first part, but this is where you lost me. Why is the Iran war guaranteed to have long-term net negative consequences? It seems far too early to predict the outcome with any kind of certainty.
- mjburgess 7mo agoIran's principle strategy is to impose severe economic consequences on the US and its allies, to tip the balance of resolve in their favour. This is easy for them to do, because closing vital shipping lanes and attacking energy infrastructure in the region is done at only the cost of a few drones -- whilst defending this is incredibly expensive. This asymmetry is the only one which is profoundly in Iran's favour, and their best strategy for forcing a diplomatic resolution. This is why they are attacking multiple US allies in the region.
- lumost 7mo agoThe Iran war is symptomatic of what's to come. If the US/other major powers feel unconstrained to wage semi-limited disruptive conflicts at will - then the world will be much less stable. Iran can close the straight of hormuz as retaliation, and there really isn't anything that can be done about it except for invasion. Other countries have similar capabilities or can acquire them readily. If Cuba wanted to close the gulf in retaliation for a US attack - they could, Denmark could lock the north sea to US shipping and naval traffic etc. etc.
- syntaxing 7mo agoWhile this article is old, there’s more and more noise that the lay offs is this month. That being said, I can’t help but wonder if the paramount deal accelerated these plans.
- jmpman 7mo agoWhen there was an over buildout of fiber back in the dotcom boom, how did that turn out? Who were the winners and losers? At what timeline did new winners emerge from that bubble?
- esaym 7mo agoOh do tell.
- saos 7mo agoJust checked. They have 162,000 employees. So thats like 18% cut? I don't even know what that company does. I'm sure it's valuable for a reason, just never understood what they do. Edit: Google says they sell Database software. OK.
- sp4cec0wb0y 7mo agoEver heard of JDE?
- LtWorf 7mo agoAFAIK they mostly sue other companies and occasionally write some software.
- _zoltan_ 7mo agoYou don't know what Oracle does? What?
- rsynnott 7mo agoI mean, it's a fair question. I think a lot of people would think of the RDBMS, but obviously they don't have 180k people working on that. They do all sorts of other stuff as well, of course, but I'm not sure people necessarily think of that when they hear 'Oracle'. A database, plus American SAP, plus a sort of also-ran AWS-type thing, plus the sad remains of Sun, is about it.
- _zoltan_ 7mo agothey lease a lot of data center space to GCP/AWS/Azure effectively taking on capex.
- saos 7mo agoYes, I don't know what they do and I'm totally not ashamed
- internet101010 7mo agoThey sell unsexy infra. For example, if you are a retailer everything from the POS system to the accounting system behind it to the ERP system that sits on top of that. Absolutely terrible products to work with both from a user and developer standpoint, but once they are up and running they are built like tanks.
- Sathwickp 7mo agoI would assume it's the mediocre people that will be let go first
- LtWorf 7mo agoIt's probably the people who were too busy working to play the office politics game that are let go first.
- add-sub-mul-div 7mo agoThe mediocre will be the ones most eager to use AI to generate their output, which will satisfy management's short term cost saving goals.
- Ifkaluva 7mo agoThe competent will ditch the sinking ship of their own accord.
- segmondy 7mo agoI hope Larry screws up big time and blows up Oracle so it can go the way of Sun.
- jihadjihad 7mo agoHow dare you besmirch Sun’s good name for no reason.
- dmix 7mo agoI'm pretty bullish on AI but Oracle's massive investments confuse me the most.
- Joel_Mckay 7mo agoLLM are not real "AI", but are good at some types of problems like context search, and isomorphic plagiarism. Regulatory capture to manufacture a monopolistic position is what many are planning. As gambling with other peoples money still has few fiscal consequences (see 2008), but will hurt Americans when the bubble implodes. Note more cheap energy for home users typically means higher standards of living, and the Westinghouse electric economic cycle from the 1950s is now broken. Data centers are consuming the community infrastructure equity, and it will cost voters sooner or later. Individuals can't stop trends, but one may profit from the predictable nature of both the unscrupulous and hapless. "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered" as they say on wall-street. =3 "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
- dmix 7mo agoOracle is building giant datacenters/cloud stuff for AI, not their own LLMs
- Joel_Mckay 7mo agoThe circular financing is not complicated with OpenAI, Nvidia, and Oracle. =3
- hapless 7mo agoClown shit. Sell your ORCL while you can, folks
- zahlman 7mo agoTFA was published Jan 30, and ORCL's recent peak was last September. The stock continued to slide until the recent minimum Feb 5 and in the month since then has rallied 12%. Any possible moment to respond to the story is long gone.
- linhns 7mo agoIt has been on a run that is confusing after that peak, which is undeserving.
- matt3210 7mo agoI guess ai is putting people out of work just by funding issues and not actually replacing them
- qwertyuiop_ 7mo agoThe hollowing out of middle class continues unabated. The accelerants to this conflagration are continuing mass offshoring and simultaneous layoffs in America pinning the blame on AI driven efficiencies.
- bitroughj 7mo agoBut Jeevons paradox…