Oracle Just Fired 21,000 People to Buy More Nvidia Chips

Oracle just made it legal: the company admitted in its official SEC filing that AI is officially replacing staff. This isn't corporate speak; it’s a direct confession that the firm cut its global headcount by 13%, dropping from 162,000 to 141,000 employees. The financial cost of this "optimization" hit $1.84 billion in severance and office closures, a massive jump from the previous year’s $374 million.

The carnage was widespread. Sales and marketing took the hardest hit with a 19% reduction, while the R&D department shed 7,000 engineers. In some cases, like the infamous Austin office, 47 database administrators were swapped for automated systems monitored by just three architects. Even the Oracle Health division, formerly Cerner, saw between 8,000 to 10,000 heads rolled.

Meanwhile, Larry Ellison is betting the farm on hardware. Oracle’s capital expenditures skyrocketed by 162% to $55.7 billion, leaving the company with a staggering negative free cash flow of $23.7 billion. To fund this, they are piling on debt and planning to hike infrastructure spending to $70 billion next year to build more AI clouds than anyone else.

Watching a company burn through billions of dollars of liquidity to chase the Nvidia gold rush while dumping its own workforce is the ultimate Silicon Valley fever dream. Investors seem to love the gamble, but the long-term question remains: when the machines finally run the company, who is going to be left to fix the code when the AI inevitably hallucinates a system crash?

Source: SEC