You say that like it wasn't the goal
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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I wonder if it's related at all to this ongoing trend ( How Money Works on YouTube). Tech Bros got sore about the post-epidemic culture at their companies: People wanted to work from home, and knew that their talent was important so they got bold asking for pay raises and benefits.
And the tech bros took this personally. So first came the RTO mandates (which got rid of some techs, specifically the best and brightest) and then came later layoffs, some of which were blamed on AI automation.
AI automation was never actually that much further along.
Anyway, they laid off too many people, to the point that the remaining workforce didn't know how to run the business and the tech. So they had to hire back some of the greybeards, and are still replacing lost positions with rookies fresh out of college.
I think this layout is 100% about S&P downgrading Oracle's credit rating to one step above junk. They're on the hook for the WB acquisition and the data centre build out for OpenAI, both of which look hugely negative. Wisconsin (data centre location) just sent the a bill for $7B because they don't trust oracle to pay the future costs to the state the development would incur.
With no credit rating, and not much liquid cash all they can do is cut costs. Hence layoff.
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Jesus. This puts workers at, what, 150-200k laid off this year? Awful.
But I do like that part about mandatory power grid guarantees. If we lived in a reasonable country that would be a federal regulation.
Yeah. Wisconsin sticking up for itself.
And Oracle's only angle was, "You'll regret this. People will go elsewhere!"
Seriously, I don't see what data centres give their hosts. They barely require a workforce after setup, they rip through resources, they fuck with the environment, they offer no municipal services, and they're eyesores. At best they're a form of property tax revenue and I guess rates revenue.
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let's just say $100k if there's the random custodial engineer in the mix. That $2.1 billion in salary. They reduced headcount 13% in 2025 and this would bea 15% from that. Probably cash strapped and about to go bust. Good.
This shit is literally ruining the industry for developers/engineers.
At least most of the ones I know and work with.
it's ruining the industry right now. when the bubble bursts and the datacenters crater it will be a new golden era for farming!
I know plenty of devs who just want to farm, or hunt, or build shit.
I can't wait for the farming industry to be disrupted when 100,000 seasoned engineers descend upon companies like john deere. they'll be like a plague of locusts that will blot out the sun forever.
I'm going to start a reptile business. Fuck it.
I've been of the opinion that Silicon Valley and tech in the US has effectively drawn in the very best of several countries and collectively robbed so many industries of some of the smartest people around.
These people retraining or going back home and into other industries could be an economic boom in the making.
Last week we received the CPU (Critical Patch Update) for Oracle products, which is a list of strongly recommended patches. They issue 4 per year (end of January, April, July and October). ALL patches were late.
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To fund the rapid expansion, Oracle took aggressive efficiency measures and enacted a sweeping wave of layoffs. 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. The deep cuts followed an operational restructuring driven in part by the internal adoption of AI technologies.
If I read this new article right, they're just talking about the layoffs from ORCL's March/April 2026, which was their last fiscal year, which ended May 31 2026. I think this is just repeating old news. Anyone else read it that way?
As a result, Oracle is now required to provide cash collateral or a letter of credit in the astronomical sum of over $7 billion just to connect the building to the power grid, a setup whose ongoing maintenance will cost the company more than $100 million annually.
That seems to be what this article really has for news and that's really funny, IMO. Go get 'em, Wisconsin.
It is burying old news in headline. The consequences/pitfalls of their "strategic shift" are fairly new. The layoffs were explicitly justified for pivot to datacenters that OpenAI will "surely" be able to rent. The new extra problems in that strategic shift just makes them look worse for going all in on the bubble.
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Sane regulation. You like to see it.
$7 billion required collateral. , $100 million annually, $15 billion
Oracle's argument of "this investment is worth $15 billion" is not only entirely besides the point, which the regulating government office rightfully refuses, but "'worth' in your state or city is entirely pointless if it incurs not that amount of local public gain but only public cost. It's a stupid, misleading argument.
I'm really interested in what that 21k employee loss mean in practice. In a hype-craze it's probably not sane restructuring and letting go of unneeded personal and inefficiencies, I assume.