Oracle has announced that it is laying off thousands of employees, reported CNBC, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Late Tuesday (31 March), Oracle said it will lay off 491 employees who work remotely in Washington state and at its Seattle offices, effective 1 June, according to a notice filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.

Despite these job cuts, Oracle stated that its Seattle locations will continue operating.

The company had a global workforce of approximately 162,000 full-time staff as of May 2025.

Oracle did not comment on the scale of layoffs or on media reports regarding further reductions.

The layoffs coincide with Oracle’s increased investment in AI infrastructure as it seeks to compete more effectively with major cloud providers such as Alphabet and Amazon.

In a filing made in March, Oracle disclosed that expenses tied to its fiscal 2026 restructuring could total as much as $2.1bn. Reuters reported that most of these costs are expected to stem from employee severance payments and related outlays.

This announcement comes amid widespread job reductions across the technology sector.

Oracle’s share price rose by more than 5% during Tuesday afternoon trading but remains down about 29% for the year.

The company continues to sell its core database products and is investing heavily in data-centre expansion to support AI workloads, but it still holds a smaller share of the cloud market than its leading competitors.

Last month, Oracle announced new features for its AI Database platform, designed to help organisations develop and deploy AI applications that use business data across different environments.

The updated Oracle AI Database allows direct integration of agentic AI with operational databases and analytic lakehouses. This integration gives AI agents access to real-time enterprise data and incorporates large language models trained on public datasets.