While Oracle has not confirmed that it is conducting layoffs, it would not be the first tech giant to slash jobs in response to the mounting pressure to invest in AI. Big US firms such as Amazon, UPS, and Dow have announced an estimated total of 52,000 job cuts with experts noting that companies “appear eager to use artificial intelligence to reduce labour costs,” according to a recent report by Financial Times.

Oracle’s debt has continued to climb in the past few months, even as its fortunes become increasingly ⁠tied to OpenAI, ⁠which is ​not profitable and has not detailed how it would finance its infrastructure plans. Last month, Oracle was sued by bondholders who said they suffered ‍losses because the company concealed its need to sell significant additional debt to build out its AI infrastructure.

On Sunday, February 1, Oracle said it is looking to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in 2026 using a combination of debt and equity financing. “Oracle is raising money in order to ‌build additional capacity to meet the contracted demand ​from our largest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers, including AMD, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, TikTok, xAI and others”, the company was quoted as saying by Reuters.

What is the Oracle-OpenAI deal?

In September 2025, Oracle signed a deal with OpenAI which stipulates that the ChatGPT maker purchase $300 billion worth of compute power from the cloud provider over a span of five years, according to a report by Wall Street Journal.

In its note, TD Cowen estimated that Oracle’s deal with OpenAI is going to require $156 billion in capital spending. Oracle is also reportedly building AI infrastructure for Meta and Nvidia in a $523 billion total commitment.

Additionally, the company is part of the Stargate Project, in which several other players such as Softbank and OpenAI have committed to invest $500 billion to build data centres and other infrastructure in the US over the next four years.