Oracle announced Monday that it has cut 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a 13% decline and represents more job cuts than previously known, including in AI. “Workforce reductions can and will continue as we adopt and deploy AI technologies across the company’s operations,” the company said in its annual financial regulatory filing.
This revelation puts new numbers on what many in the tech industry feel is an epidemic. Companies are reporting record profits while shedding employees, pointing to AI as both an engine of growth and a reason for cuts. Skills layoffs hit their highest month in years in May, with AI being the most cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
We recently wrote about why this rationale might make companies want to rethink it. Especially for many of these companies, as the roles they are currently shrinking have become inflated during the pandemic hiring surge, raising questions about what is actually happening. Below, we take a reverse chronological look at the large technology companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a key driver.
GitLab — June 3, 2026. In one of the most recent cuts on this list, GitLab laid off about 350 employees, about 14% of its workforce, to fund investments in AI infrastructure and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agent workloads were pushing competitors over the edge and the company had begun a “generational rebuild” of its core infrastructure to support 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening its management hierarchy and working with an unspecified AI lab to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, up 23% year over year, and expects to incur $30 million to $35 million in restructuring costs.
Google — It runs until May. Alphabet’s Google has quietly cut staff across its cloud division, including cybersecurity staff linked to its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant, even as its cloud revenue rose 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has laid off more than a third of the managers who oversee small teams. That means managers have 35% fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never released a single overall figure. The cuts were made through a rolling performance review process, voluntary acquisition program and restructuring, with a total of 1,500 to 3,000 more engineers by 2026, according to external estimates.
intuit — May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminate about 3,000 jobs, or about 17% of its workforce, in a restructuring focused on reducing complexity and reallocating resources to AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi told employees that the company can deliver better products by reducing complexity and simplifying its structure.
meta — May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, and moved about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (which they reportedly dislike). Zuckerberg told employees that cuts were needed because “success is not a given” in AI.
cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced it was cutting about 4,000 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profits and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This isn’t really a cost-cutting-driven restructuring… this is a realignment of resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”
Cloudflare — May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people) to deliver quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and the highest single-quarter revenue in the company’s history. “The majority of the employees we laid off last week were in middle management, finance, legal, internal audit, revenue recognition, and other measurement roles,” CEO Matthew Prince wrote.
general motors — May 12, 2026. GM has eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, mostly in IT roles, in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, as it said it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that while AI played a role in the decision, it was not the only reason. GM said in a statement that it is “transforming our information technology organization to better position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still had about 80 IT positions open, including roles in AI, motorsports and self-driving cars.
coinbase — May 5, 2026. The cryptocurrency exchange said it would cut around 700 employees, or 14% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring to address market volatility and increase AI efficiency. The company said it would simplify its organizational structure to five layers under a CEO and COO and experiment with “one-person teams” that would combine engineering, design and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI has dramatically changed the pace of work. “Engineers use AI to deliver work in days that used to take teams weeks.” The company needed to “leverage AI in all aspects of its business.”
paypal — May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut about 20% of its 4,500 jobs over the next two to three years as part of a transformation strategy centered on adopting AI and simplifying the organization. CEO Enrique Lores told investors that the company would “aggressively adopt AI” in its development processes and that he would form a new “AI Transformation and Simplification” team that would report directly to him and be tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “function-by-function.” Lores framed the cuts as eliminating organizational layers and said AI would expand beyond coding into customer service, support operations and risk management.
microsoft — April-May 2026. Microsoft proposed an acquisition structured around voluntary layoffs, without disclosing how many employees would be affected. CFO Amy Hood said overall headcount was down year-over-year in the fiscal third quarter and expected to continue to decline as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with speed and agility” amid increased AI investments.
snap — April 16, 2026. Snap cut about 16% of its global workforce (about 1,000 full-time employees) and closed more than 300 vacant positions. CEO Evan Spiegel cited AI advancements as a key driver. “Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence will allow our teams to reduce repetitive tasks, increase speed, and better support our communities, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it has already seen small teams using AI tools to drive advancements across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.
IBM — Runs until 2026. We estimate that between 3,000 and 9,000 positions will be eliminated in the U.S. between the Q4 2025 workforce reductions and the Red Hat engineering workforce reductions in April 2026, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 to over 15,000. Bloomberg reports that IBM plans to triple its hiring of new U.S. employees for AI and hybrid cloud roles, despite replacing about 200 HR positions with AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the fourth quarter of 2025 as a routine realignment affecting a “low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce.
Atlasian — March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, to “rebalance” its AI and enterprise sales, even as its stock price rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not that ‘AI replaces people,’ but it would be disingenuous to claim that AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles we need in a particular area. It does.”
dell — January 30 (released March 2026). Dell’s overall workforce will decline by about 10% in fiscal 2026, by about 11,000 jobs, to about 97,000 from 108,000 the year before, and it has spent $569 million on severance pay. The cuts come as Dell expects AI-optimized server revenue to double in fiscal 2027.
trust — March 5-31, 2026. As mentioned above, Oracle began informing employees via terminal emails that they would be laying off thousands of employees. The cuts come despite Oracle reporting quarterly net income of $3.7 billion, up 27% year-over-year, and remaining performance obligations up 325% to $553 billion. The savings were translated into AI data centers. A total of 21,000 cuts will be made over the next 12 months, as Oracle disclosed in its June 22 annual report.
block — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block laid off 4,000 employees. This reduced the number of employees from more than 10,000 to less than 6,000. Dorsey wrote about X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we create and use, along with smaller, flatter teams, are enabling new ways of working that fundamentally change what it means to build and run a company.” He added, “It seems like most companies are late,” and “Within next year, most companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”
Salesforce — February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off less than 1,000 employees across its marketing, product management, data analytics, and Agentforce AI departments. “The benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce have reduced the number of support cases we handle and we no longer need to actively fill support engineer roles,” the company told Fortune. This follows a previous cut of around 4,000 customer support roles, reducing the team from around 9,000 to 5,000. CEO Marc Benioff said the company would need “fewer people” because AI agents would handle the work.
Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following a 14,000 job cut in October 2025. This represents approximately 9% of the company’s workforce in three months. The company said this was part of “strengthening the organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership and eliminating bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy said in June 2025, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, the way work gets done will have to change. There will be fewer people doing some of the tasks we do today. In the next few years, we expect the overall enterprise workforce to shrink as we gain efficiencies through the widespread use of AI across the company.”
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