Shares of Oracle moved lower in New York shortly after lunchtime after Bloomberg News reported that the company is preparing to lay off thousands of workers as it spends aggressively on AI data center buildouts. The timing is not ideal: credit markets are starting to crack, concerns about Blue Owl are mounting, and the data center CapEx boom is looking increasingly frothy.

The planned cuts will affect divisions across the company and may be implemented by the end of this month, according to the outlet, citing people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. Some of the cuts will target jobs that AI will replace, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Wall Street analysts forecast that the cloud unit's data center spending will drive Oracle's cash flow negative through the end of the decade, with a payoff not expected until 2030. Oracle has said it may raise up to $50 billion this year through debt and equity to fund data center buildouts.

This week, Oracle internally announced that it would review many of the open job listings in its cloud division, effectively slowing or freezing the hiring process, according to the sources.

Separately, Oracle previously disclosed its largest-ever restructuring plan, up to $1.6 billion in the fiscal year ending May (including severance). That disclosure helped push ORCL CDS wider, and the spread has since blown out to its widest level since the 2008 financial crisis.

It seems as though the stock has a lot of catching up to do.

The latest Bloomberg data show the company has 162,000 employees globally as of the end of May 2025. There is no definitive number on how many workers will be laid off in the coming weeks. The people Bloomberg cited said these plans are still active and could change.

We can certaintly call a top in the number of Oracle employees this decade.