AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees

Posted by petethomas 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by not_your_vase 1 day ago

The article seems to be more about Oracle being forced to cough up $7B as collateral for one of their new shiny (future-) data centers - even though apparently they tried to make this requirement go away, but the regulators weren't touched by their crocodile tears.

Comment by arm32 1 day ago

I'm shocked regulators didn't budge. Good.

Comment by jamesfinlayson 1 day ago

I'm in Australia and in my experience gambling regulators don't budge. Other ones might not be as strong.

Comment by jmalicki 1 day ago

This is the US. You can just throw a UFC party or something for Trump then you're good.

Comment by abrookewood 1 day ago

God I wish you were joking ...

Comment by lovich 1 day ago

I am also shocked. As a second tier citizen for being merely a human instead of a corporation I am used to having to put up collateral to get big loan deals.

I am amazed that our betters are being held to the same standards. Maybe they forgot to pay a few million in lobbying to get the preferred treatment plan.

Comment by ryandrake 1 day ago

There must be something else going on. It's 2026. How in the world could a local government in the USA just... fail to let a corporation break the rules and do anything it wants? It defies belief.

Comment by mawadev 1 day ago

You kinda think senior management knows what goes on, but if you ever got in touch with senior management, you just know they have no idea and go off of vibes, as soon as the vibe shifts around them, its time to socialize the consequences... downwards

Comment by etempleton 1 day ago

There are maybe 1 in 10 that really truly know what they are doing.

Comment by PearlRiver 1 day ago

To be fair some of those CEOs will have trouble finding golf buddies for a few months.

Comment by NotMichaelBay 1 day ago

> By the end of fiscal year 2026, the company's workforce was slashed by about 21,000 employees – a decline of roughly 13% – from 162,000 to 141,000 workers.

Is this article from the future?

> Story by WALLA! MONEY

Who?

Comment by toast0 1 day ago

Oracle's fiscal year is June through May. And they enumerate their years so that the year number matches the calendar year when the year closes in May.

I'd guess their fiscal year is trying to align with fiscal years of schools and governments, which are major customers and often have budget cycles aligned july-june or similar.

Comment by wraptile 22 hours ago

It feels like the end is near for Oracle, and good riddance?

I'm not an American, so I'm not familiar with Oracle's database tech but looking through history of what good/bad Oracle has done for the world:

- good: btrfs for linux

- good: mysql (inherited)

- good: openjdk (inherited)

- good: virtualbox

- bad: oracle v google (copyrighting APIs)

- bad: mass surveillance (i.e. BlueKai)

- bad: aggressive value extraction

- bad: general mega corporation bullying

Sad that 21,000 people lost their jobs, but I don't think many people are shedding tears for Oracle itself.

Comment by martheen 22 hours ago

Virtualbox is inherited too, originally by Innotek, then they got bought by Sun, and later Sun bought by Oracle. Oracle also let OpenOffice languish, restricted Solaris, restricted the Java framework (it was already open sourced by Sun before their acquisition, we got tons of OpenJDK build precisely because of Oracle hobbling Java licensing) and sit on the Java language development long enough that JetBrains comes up with Kotlin (is that "good"? Probably bad, just like if someone let a good restaurant crumble and others got fed up and start their own)

Comment by Cider9986 22 hours ago

I don't understand why Oracle is hated more on HN than other large companies.

I saw that whole "don't anthropomorphize Oracle" but I suppose it's hard to understand if you weren't there.

Comment by trentor 19 hours ago

Killing sun was unforgivable for most old timers like me.

Comment by tonyedgecombe 21 hours ago

Apple gets a lot of hate here (mostly unjustified in my opinion).

Comment by 20 hours ago

Comment by Imustaskforhelp 18 hours ago

> I don't understand why Oracle is hated more on HN than other large companies.

My personal opinion is that HN and the tech/genera community treat it as more as being a lawyer company (or having a very large amount of lawyers in general) and actively hostile to many aspects of tech.

It has very Microsoft-y vibes (minus Github/any goodwill that Microsoft has ever earned or past nostalgia like windows xp/7) while at the same time as @trentor said, they killed sun so they actively harmed the nostalgia aspects/goodwill (ironic how both of it is about Operating systems and for all its faults of Microsoft, they have handled the nostalgia part much better than Oracle)

Comment by fsuts 22 hours ago

    >According to the annual report of the computing giant published this week, the company had 141,000 employees as of May 31, 2026. This is a significant downsizing compared to the corresponding period last year, when the number of employees at Oracle stood at approximately 162,000 people. The report further reveals that the company paid a massive fortune of $1.84 billion for severance pay and other retirement expenses accompanying the restructuring moves in the current fiscal year.

Workforce remains huge at 141k so perhaps a non story and just normal big company rounds of redundancies that were the case pre-ai

Comment by chrisandchris 19 hours ago

Didn't know they had 20k developers. I thought Oracle is just lawyers. Or did they replace lawyers with AI?

Comment by sinuhe69 1 day ago

Best part:

“Oracle petitioned the court against the requirement, arguing that these financing costs would deter future investment in the state, while emphasizing its commitment to the project, […]. Regulators, on the other hand, remained firm in their stance, clarifying that existing customers should not subsidize data centers. This issue is not limited to Wisconsin: At least 24 US states have already approved special rates, minimum conditions, exit penalties, and collateral requirements for heavy electricity consumers.

Comment by DonHopkins 1 day ago

I love the smell of freshly mown grass in the morning!

When I joined the grass cutting lawnmower party, I didn't think it would mow my lawn!

Comment by BikiniPrince 1 day ago

They just deleted some TPM positions.

Comment by mgdev 1 day ago

Never bet against Clay.

Comment by ChrisArchitect 1 day ago

[dupe]

Recent related:

Oracle could face $7B collateral bill for Wisconsin data centre

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993488