Oracle cuts about 500 jobs in Romania as AI restructuring rolls on

Oracle laid off about 500 employees in Romania on June 25, continuing its global restructuring toward cloud and AI. The cuts follow a reduction of 400 jobs in late 2025, bringing Oracle's global headcount down 13% to 141,000 as the company funds AI data center investments partly through payroll reductions.

On the morning of June 25, Oracle began telling roughly 500 of its Romanian employees that their jobs were gone, part of the company’s long-running global reorganisation toward cloud and artificial intelligence. Oracle has not commented publicly on the exact number of local roles affected. It is the second such round in Romania in under a year. Oracle cut about 400 positions there in late 2025, in what was then the largest restructuring in the company’s history, and the new wave lands on an operation that employs around 4,000 people locally, one of Oracle’s larger engineering and services footprints in central and eastern Europe. By the end of 2025, its three main Romanian entities together employed 4,288, according to figures filed with the finance ministry. A former Oracle employee, speaking to Ziarul Financiar, framed the cuts as the continuation of a plan already set in motion rather than a fresh decision. The current round, the person said, is part of the restructuring decided in the previous fiscal year, with the names drawn up as far back as the spring, adding that “it is possible that further adjustments will follow. ” That is the kind of detail that turns a single announcement into an open question for everyone still at their desk. The local picture sits inside a much larger one. Oracle’s global headcount stood at about 141,000 full-time staff at the end of May 2026, down from 162,000 a year earlier, a reduction of close to 13%. The company has been candid in its regulatory filings about why. Its annual report stated that the adoption of AI across its operations has resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to its workforce, the sort of plain language that is rare in a document built to reassure investors, and the reason Oracle’s workforce shrank by about 13% https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-workforce-shrinks-13-percent-ai-buildout in a year. The logic is the one running through much of the industry. Oracle is pouring money into data centres to chase AI demand, including a vast commitment tied to OpenAI, and is funding that build-out partly by cutting payroll. The company is also under financial pressure of its own, with its shares down more than 10% since the start of the year amid wider unease about how quickly the AI spending will pay off. The earlier global round, in which Oracle shed around 21,000 jobs https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-21000-layoffs-ai-data-centres , was justified in almost identical terms. That wave hit some divisions harder than others, with Oracle Health, the business built on the $28.3bn Cerner acquisition, among the most heavily affected. The Romanian cuts are a smaller, later tributary of the same current, the part that reaches a specific building in Bucharest rather than a line in a filing. Romania’s Oracle business has been growing on the top line even as it sheds staff. The three main local entities booked combined revenue of about 1.79bn lei in 2025, roughly €354.8m, up 7.5% on the prior year. Yet they also slipped into the red together, posting combined net losses of 34.8m lei after a small cumulative profit in 2024. Each entity moved differently, with Oracle Romania falling into loss, Oracle Global Services Romania deepening its deficit, and Oracle Sovereign Cloud Romania also turning negative despite higher sales. For the country, the cuts are a reminder of how exposed its large technology-services sector is to decisions made in California. Romania built much of its tech economy on exactly this kind of work, the engineering and support functions that multinationals locate where skilled labour is cheaper, and those are the functions an AI-driven reorganisation reaches first. Oracle’s revenue in Romania is still rising. Its headcount there is not, and on the former employee’s account, the spring’s list of names may not be the last. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.