Layoffs hit Oracle Cloud teams in US, India, and Canada

Oracle is reducing staff in its cloud division, a move aimed at managing costs while the company continues to pour money into AI infrastructure.

Sources familiar with the matter said employees were told this week that their positions had been cut. Some of the layoffs were tied to performance, and hiring is still underway in parts of the unit, according to two of the sources.

India appears to be one of the hardest-hit regions, while teams in the US are still learning the extent of the reductions. DatacentreDynamics also reported job losses in Canada.

In the Seattle area – long considered the hub of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) – more than 150 jobs have been eliminated, sources said. The company announced last year that it would move its headquarters to Nashville, and it now lists more openings in the state of Tennessee than in any other.

The total number of job cuts is unclear, but affected teams include OCI’s Enterprise Engineering group, Fusion ERP, data centre operations technicians, technical project managers on the AI/ML team, and members of the broader OCI AI team.

While the first wave has focused on the US and India, employees in other regions have been invited to meetings with unclear purposes with managers later this week, raising concerns about further cuts.

This is not the first round of layoffs for OCI. In November, the division let go of several hundred workers, and Oracle made deeper company-wide cuts in March, affecting thousands.

At the same time, Oracle is hiring heavily to support the expansion of its AI data centres, which are central to OpenAI’s Stargate project. Earlier this year, OpenAI agreed to a $30 billion-a-year contract with Oracle. The cloud provider has also secured large-scale contracts with TikTok and Temu.

The company’s share price surged 52% this year, reaching record highs. The momentum has been fuelled in part by its cloud business, which last month signed a deal with OpenAI for about 4.5 gigawatts of data centre power in the US. But meeting the rising demand for AI services comes at a steep cost. Oracle is expected to spend tens of billions of dollars building massive new server farms, and its free cash flow for the fiscal year ending in May was negative.

Many large tech firms are making similar moves – cutting expenses in some areas while investing heavily in AI. Microsoft has eliminated about 15,000 jobs in 2025, while Amazon and Meta have also reduced staff.

In a June filing, Oracle said it periodically makes workforce changes because of shifts in strategy, reorganisations, or performance issues. “The types of restructurings have resulted, and may in the future result, in increased restructuring costs and temporarily reduced productivity while employees adjust to the restructuring,” the company said.

For now, the mix of layoffs and new hiring underscores the balancing act for Oracle and other tech companies: scaling up AI infrastructure at record speed while controlling the cost burden that come with major investment in hardware.

See also: Cloud jobs cut as AI bites

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