Oracle officially acknowledged that the introduction of artificial intelligence led to a massive downsizing of staff. In an annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company reported that its workforce had decreased by 21,000 during the year, from 162,000 to 141,000. Oracle spent about $1.8 billion on this painful restructuring, which is directly linked to business process automation.

CEO Mike Sicilia has previously emphasized that the company is actively using advanced AI tools to write code to accelerate the development of SaaS. This step is part of Oracle’s global transformation from a classic database maker to a cloud giant competing with AWS and Azure. It is worth noting that co-founder Larry Allison, a close friend of Donald Trump’s, had previously profited from the AI Hiip, becoming the richest man on the planet.

The paradox of the situation is that, amid massive layoffs, Oracle continues to make record-high outward investments: capital expenditures over the past year amounted to $55.7 billion, focused mainly on building data centers for clients like OpenAI. And in the SEC report itself, the company gives an honest warning about the risks of this approach: mass layoffs could lead to a shortage of skilled workers, loss of valuable institutional knowledge, and a decline in morale among remaining employees.