Oracle disclosed on Monday that it has cut its workforce by 21,000 in the past 12 months, a 13% decrease, meaning more cuts than previously known, including jobs eliminated due to AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technology across our operations has resulted, and may continue to result, in the reduction of our workforce,” the company said in an annual regulatory filing.
The revelation puts new numbers to what many in the tech industry feel like an epidemic: companies reporting record revenues while simultaneously laying off workers, pointing to AI as the engine of growth and the reason for the cuts. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in years in May, and AI was the most cited reason, according to recruitment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
We recently wrote about why that reason is something that companies may want to rethink, not least because many of these companies, the number of people who are being cut now were hired during the employment crisis, raising questions about what is really going on. Below, a practical look – in chronological order – at the biggest tech companies that announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a mention.
GitLab — June 3, 2026. In one of the most recent cuts on the list, GitLab laid off about 350 employees, about 14% of its workforce, to fund investments in AI infrastructure and to handle increased traffic from AI operations. Chief executive Bill Staples said the workload is “pushing competitors to the brink” and that the company has begun to “rebuild” its core infrastructure to support what he calls 100x growth requirements. GitLab spans 22 countries, lower management layers, and partnered with an unnamed 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 to $35 million in restructuring costs.
Google – continues in May. Alphabet’s Google cut staff in its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence group and cybersecurity staff linked to Mandiant, as Cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to more than $460 billion. Last year, Google cut more than a third of managers who oversaw small teams — 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike many companies on this list, Google has never announced a single overall number – the reductions came through a performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural restructuring, with external estimates placing the total by 2026 between 1,500 and 3,000+ engineers.
Intuit – May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminate nearly 3,000 jobs – about 17% of its total workforce – in a restructuring focused on reducing complexity and reallocating resources to AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told employees that the company is reducing complexity and simplifying the structure, so that it can deliver better products.
Meta — May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 workers to new roles focused on AI (which they reportedly hate). Zuckerberg told employees that the cuts were necessary because “success is not a given” in AI.
Cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco has announced it is cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profits and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This was not really a savings-driven restructuring… [about] restructuring … resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”
Cloudflare – May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut nearly 20% of its workforce (1,100 people), reporting quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year over year and the highest single quarter in company history. Chief executive Matthew Prince wrote that “most of those we let go last week were non-quants” – middle management, finance, legal, internal audit and revenue recognition.
General Motors — May 12, 2026. GM has eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, mostly in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that AI played a role in the decision but was not the only reason. GM’s statement said it is “transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still had about 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, sports, and autonomous vehicles.
Coinbase – May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange said it is cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing AI efficiency. The company made its organizational structure five layers under a CEO and COO, and said it would try a “one-person team” that includes engineering, design, and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI has dramatically changed the pace of work — “engineers are using AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks” — and that the company needs to “increase AI in every aspect of our operations.”
PayPal – May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years – north of 4,500 jobs – as part of a transformation strategy focused on AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores told investors that the company will “powerfully use AI” in its development processes and created a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s “work-based” processes. Lores framed the cuts as removing organizational layers, and said AI will extend beyond coding into customer service, support operations, and risk management.
Microsoft – April-May 2026. Microsoft offered the planned buyout as a voluntary separation, without disclosing how many employees this would affect. CFO Amy Hood said the total was down year-over-year in Q3 revenue, and is expected to continue to decline as the company focuses on “building high-performance teams that work faster and faster” amid growing AI investments.
Snap – April 16, 2026. Snap has cut about 16% of its global workforce – about 1,000 full-time workers – and closed more than 300 open roles, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advances as the main driver. “Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are enabling our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase speed, and better support our community, partners, and marketers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it has already seen small teams using AI tools to drive improvements across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.
IBM — beyond 2026. Between the Q4 2025 cuts and the April 2026 Red Hat engineering downsizing, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 US positions eliminated, bringing IBM’s total as of September 2024 to more than 15,000. Bloomberg reported that IBM plans to triple its hiring in the US in AI and hybrid-cloud roles, as nearly 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesman described the Q4 2025 round as a general rebalancing affecting a “low single digit percentage” of its workforce worldwide.
Atlassian – March 11, 2026. Atlassian has cut nearly 1,600 jobs (10% of its workforce) to “focus” on AI and business sales, as shares rose nearly 2% on the news. Chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be remiss to pretend that AI isn’t changing the mix of skills we need or the number of roles needed in certain areas. It helps.”
Dell – Jan 30 (although revealed in March 2026). Dell’s workforce is down about 10% in fiscal 2026 — about 11,000 jobs — to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 a year ago, and $569 million was spent on layoffs. The cuts come as Dell predicts that AI-enabled server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.
The Oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As noted above, Oracle began telling employees that it would cut thousands of jobs through terminal emails. The cuts came as Oracle posted $3.7 billion in quarterly revenue, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining operating commitments up 325% to $553 billion — savings redirected to AI data centers. About 21,000 cuts over 12 months, as Oracle disclosed in its June 22 annual filing.
Block it — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block cuts 4,000 jobs – nearly half of its workforce, down to less than 6,000 from more than 10,000. Dorsey wrote in X: “We’re realizing that the intellectual tools we’re building and using, combined with small and agile teams, are enabling a new way of working that’s fundamentally changing what it means to build and run a company.” He added: “I think many companies are late. In the next year, I believe most companies will come to the same conclusion and make the same structural changes.”
Salesforce — February 10, 2026. Salesforce has laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The company told Fortune, “Due to the benefits and effectiveness of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decrease and we no longer have to backlog support engineer roles.” This followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer support roles, reducing that group from about 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “smaller heads” because AI agents were handling the work.
Amazon – January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025 – nearly 9% of its corporate workforce in three months. The company said it was part of a “strengthening”.[ing] our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing leadership.” CEO Andy Jassy had said in June 2025 that, “As we roll out more productive AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are done today… in the next few years, we expect this will reduce our corporate workforce as we realize the efficiency gains from using AI more across the company.”
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