Oracle just told the world, in writing, what most of tech has been whispering for two years: 21,000 jobs gone in twelve months, with AI getting a chunk of the credit in the company’s own annual filing. That single sentence in a regulatory document, almost clinical in its phrasing, is doing more honest work than a hundred LinkedIn posts about “reimagining the workforce.”
The steady culling of tech’s talent
The headline number is brutal. Oracle’s global headcount fell from 162,000 to 141,000 in a year, a 13% cut even as the company posted $3.7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% from a year earlier.
Larry Ellison’s company is pouring roughly $70 billion into AI infrastructure and data centers for clients like OpenAI, even as it spends $1.8 billion on severance, nearly five times the previous year’s restructuring bill. The pattern is now familiar: record performance on one line of the balance sheet, record layoffs on another, and AI sitting comfortably as the explanation for both.
It isn’t just Oracle either. Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 jobs in the past seven months. Meta has trimmed thousands more. Dell shed 11,000 roles. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut nearly half its workforce and called it the future of how companies will run. Across the industry, the tally of AI-linked tech layoffs over the past year has crossed 100,000 by some trackers, with the broader twelve-month number put closer to 165,000.
The truth hits close to home too
In India too, this is a reality. Some career professionals were let go after decades in the same company, most of them simply over email. Oracle laid off 12,000 in India in this year alone, and TCS cut 12,000. Infosys pulled 400 trainees from a single training campus.
Tech job openings in India are at a 28-month low. An industry that has been the country’s middle-class engine for three decades, the one that turned an engineering loan and a decent grasp of English into a home and a comfortable lifestyle, is now the place layoffs start.
And yet, somehow, the same Big Tech is also hiring in India. FAAMNG firms have added 13,600 employees here this year, smaller and far more selective than the 32,000 they added in 2025, but still a net addition while the rest of the industry contracts.
The jobs being created skew toward AI/ML, data engineering, cloud and cybersecurity. But more tellingly, those being destroyed skew toward the very work that built India’s IT sector in the first place: support functions, back office engineering, the “decent engineer” pipeline that economist Saurabh Mukherjea says used to absorb 1.5 million graduates a year and has now shrunk to nearly zero.
AI is making recruiters more selective
That is the real story buried under the layoff numbers. This isn’t AI killing jobs in some uniform, predictable way. It’s AI bifurcating the labour market in real time, rewarding a narrow band of specialised, high end skills while hollowing out everything beneath it, in the same companies, sometimes in the same quarter. Oracle can cut 21,000 jobs and still warn investors that the reorganisation might leave it short of skilled workers. Both things are true. The market for talent hasn’t shrunk; it has gotten brutally selective about who is still in it.
For those that got a layoff notification, none of this nuance changes the impact that has happened on their lives But for India’s policymakers, ignoring it would be fatal, potentially killing off the “demographic dividend” that is so touted. A generation of angry, qualified graduates with nowhere to put their skills would hardly be productive.
The Cockroach Janata Party’s rise out of a courtroom insult is one early signal of what happens when that anger finds a megaphone. The IT sector created jobs for the best part of three decades, but equally it created a story about what hard work and a degree could buy you. AI is rewriting that story, and despite most protestations on how AI will impact our lives positively, the truth can often be a bitter one for those hit hardest by it.
