At some point in the last six months or so, we quietly stopped arguing about whether AI was real ot just the next tech bubble waiting to pop.
That shift matters more than most people realize. Not because the debate was resolved cleanly. It wasn’t. The hype merchants are still out there, still pitching dashboards and slide decks to executives who want to look smart at board meetings. The valuations are still stretched in places. The AI wrapper startups are still going to die by the hundreds.
But the underlying technology…. That part stopped being a question. We can debate the semantics around it, but it different forms of it are likely to be around for a while.
And now we are finding out what happens when tens of thousands of people wake up to the answer.
On March 31st, somewhere around 30,000 Oracle employees started their day the same way. An email arrived at 6 a.m., signed not by anyone they knew, not by a manager, not even by an executive with a name attached to it, but by something called “Oracle Leadership.” By the time most of them finished reading it, their system access was already gone. Their unvested stock was already forfeited. Their careers at one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world were already over.
This happened, by the way, in the same quarter Oracle posted a 95% jump in net income. $6.13 billion in profit.
I want to sit with that for a second… because it sounds so strange when you say it outloud…
Oracle is not the exception here. It is the clearest example of a pattern playing out in plain sight across the entire tech industry. The global tech sector has eliminated nearly 60,000 jobs in the first three months of 2026. That works out to roughly 700 jobs gone every single day. Amazon fired 16,000 people after posting record revenue of $716 billion in 2025. Meta is cutting up to 15,000 workers while simultaneously doubling its AI capital expenditure to $135 billion. Block, Jack Dorsey’s company, cut 40% of its entire workforce and framed it as a competitive necessity.
The companies doing the cutting are not struggling. They are thriving. They just need cash.
Specifically, they need cash for data centers.
Here is the uncomfortable part. The people losing their jobs right now cannot really console themselves with the idea that this is all going to blow over.
For the past couple of years, there has been a comforting narrative available. The bubble will burst. The dot-com comparison will hold. The breathless valuations will correct, the vaporware startups will vanish, and things will return to something recognizable. That narrative still has some truth in it. The hype bubble will deflate. The me-too AI companies with no moat and no margin will disappear. Stock prices will correct in places.
But the technology itself is not going anywhere.
The distinction matters and it is getting lost in the noise. The dot-com crash was built on ideas running on air. Pets.com. Webvan. Companies that were essentially PowerPoint presentations with server rooms attached. Today’s AI infrastructure buildout is different in kind. Oracle currently sits on $523 billion in remaining performance obligations, up 433% year over year. The contracts are real. The data centers being built are physical, steel-and-concrete, take-years-to-construct infrastructure. The demand is real. The technology works.
That is exactly why the layoffs are happening. Not despite AI succeeding. Because of it.
When a company like Oracle commits to $156 billion in AI capital spending, it has to find that money somewhere. According to analysis from TD Cowen, the layoffs free up somewhere between $8 billion and $10 billion in annual cash flow. In other words, the salaries, benefits, and unvested equity of 30,000 people are the down payment on the data centers Oracle needs to stay competitive in a race it cannot afford to lose.
I spent years working inside enterprise software. I know what the teams at a company like Oracle actually build and how long it takes to develop the institutional knowledge that makes a product work for the businesses depending on it. The people who just got that 6 a.m. email were not passengers. They were the product.
And the AI race ate them.
The hardest-hit divisions were Revenue and Health Sciences, SaaS operations, and the NetSuite India Development Centre. That last one matters to me specifically. NetSuite is the product that tens of thousands of mid-market businesses run their entire operations on. The people building it, supporting it, and extending it are not interchangeable. You cannot fire a development centre and replace it with a GPU cluster and get the same outcome. Not yet anyway.
But Oracle is making a bet that the math works out. That building the infrastructure to power the next decade of AI contracts is worth more than preserving the teams that built the last decade of enterprise software. Maybe they are right. Maybe the contract backlog and the data center revenue prove it out over the next few years.
The people who got that email at 6 a.m. will not be around to find out.
I am not arguing that AI is bad, or that the race should stop, or that any of this was avoidable given the competitive dynamics at play. I genuinely believe the technology is going to matter in ways we are still figuring out how to articulate. I use it every day. It is already embedded in how I work.
But I think we owe it to ourselves to be honest about what the cost actually looks like.
The question was never really whether AI would arrive. It was always who would pay for it.
Right now the answer is turning out to be the same people it usually is. The ones who built the thing in the first place.
A race this expensive has to be funded by someone. We just found out who.
Top comments (1)
Thanks for writing. I wonder what avalanche would come when dollar loses its value gradually in near future (not next decade), it feels as an existential crisis for IT folks, sadly.