Oracle is planning to cut 20,000 to 30,000 employees — roughly 12-18% of its 162,000 global workforce — to redirect $8-10 billion toward AI data center construction, CIO reported in March 2026. The same week, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced a reduction from over 10,000 employees to under 6,000, explicitly citing AI as the reason.
Oracle’s AI Infrastructure Bet
Oracle’s capital expenditure jumped from $6.9 billion in FY2024 to $21.2 billion in FY2025, with guidance for $50 billion this fiscal year. The driver: a $156 billion contract with OpenAI requiring 3 million GPUs over five years, plus deals with Meta and xAI. The restructuring cost is estimated at $1.6 billion in severance, with implementation beginning as early as March 2026.
Oracle is not restructuring around declining revenue. It is actively growing while replacing human headcount with AI infrastructure. The company is trading labor costs for compute costs — a swap that the market has rewarded at every other company that has made it.
Dorsey’s Million Per Employee Target
Dorsey’s framing was the most explicit any major CEO has been about AI-driven workforce reduction. He is targeting $2 million or more in gross profit per employee, up from approximately $500,000 during 2019-2024 — roughly quadrupling productivity per head. Block’s CFO noted a 40% increase in production code shipped per engineer since September, attributable to AI coding tools.
Dorsey predicted most companies would follow Block’s approach within a year. Block’s stock surged 24% on the announcement. The market did not merely accept mass layoffs — it rewarded them with the largest single-day gain in the company’s history.
Combined, Oracle and Block eliminated 34,000 jobs in a single week, both companies explicitly stating AI made these roles redundant. The Quinnipiac poll finding that more than half of Americans believe AI will harm them looks less like anxiety and more like accurate assessment.
