Amid Oracle’s rise as a white knight in the artificial intelligence revolution, its fall-time layoffs have struck Redwood City perhaps harder than anywhere else in the country.
By winter, the Silicon Valley-born tech giant will have slashed well over 300 employees at its Redwood Shores office, in what could be the most layoffs at any Oracle site in the United States this season.
“That’s not great for us,” Redwood City’s Economic Development Director Amanda Anthony said.
As part of a multinational reduction of its 162,000 staff, Oracle this fall is shedding hundreds of workers in the U.S., and industry reports suggest thousands across India, the Philippines, Canada and parts of Europe as well.
Salesforce, Oracle’s main cloud rival, made similar cuts earlier this year. CEO Marc Benioff claimed in September that he chopped his headcount by 4,000 thanks to AI. Salesforce AI agents now reportedly handle about one million customer conversations.
Oracle has carried out these staffing changes synchronously with its rise as a premium artificial intelligence cloud provider.
In early September, Oracle signed a $300 billion cloud deal with OpenAI, peaking Oracle’s market value at nearly $930 billion last month, briefly crowning Oracle’s chair and co-founder Larry Ellison the world’s richest man with a momentary net worth of $393 billion, surpassing Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“The race to build the world’s greatest large language model is on,” Ellison said at the time. “Leaders like OpenAI are choosing [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] because it is the world’s fastest and most cost-effective AI infrastructure.”
Also in September, President Donald Trump’s administration fashioned a plan for Oracle to spearhead American oversight of the algorithm and security of TikTok. The Chinese-owned marketplace Temu signed a similar cloud hosting agreement with Oracle in June.
Then, last week, Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk confirmed a $65 billion cloud deal with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
Oracle has remained silent about its layoffs, declining comment to multiple news organizations, including this one. The company’s only public indication of staffing changes came from a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) report, as required by federal law, which mandates 60-days’ notice before a mass layoff, plant closure or relocation.
The global company reported its first round of Bay Area layoffs Aug. 13, exactly two months before it cut over 300 across the Bay Oct. 13. It similarly eliminated 161 employees from its Seattle office, and some number from its Kansas City health unit, formerly Cerner.
Oracle did not file a WARN report of its staffing changes in Kansas City, which means it laid off less than 500 employees, or under 33% of its 50-plus workforce, in compliance with Missouri law. The facility had an estimated 8,000 or so staff before its September reductions.
Oracle’s office in Redwood City served as the multinational company’s headquarters from 1989 until it moved to Austin, Texas during the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2020. The relocation was meant to accommodate greater work location flexibility. Ellison has since said that the company plans to move its world headquarters to Nashville.
Much of Oracle’s 1.5-million-square-foot office in Redwood City is now vacant, according to the city’s economic development director. When Oracle moved its headquarters, she knew that meant “there would be a lot of changes to our city” and to “expect more layoffs over time.”
As one of Redwood City’s “first forays” into the Silicon Valley tech scene, losing these headquarters “felt like the end of an era,” Anthony said.
Despite laying off 334 Redwood City workers before winter, Oracle is looking to fill 82 positions at its Redwood Shores location and has nearly 2,300 job listings on its site as of Oct. 21. Oracle’s Redwood City office is dominated by software developers, though many new job titles at that office include senior-level or advanced-degree titles.
The majority of Oracle’s workforce cuts have been to its employees abroad, including an estimated 10% of its roughly 30,000-person staff in India, thereby reinforcing Trump’s “Hire American” agenda.
At the start of the year, Oracle had around 4,000 employees based in Redwood City, according to Anthony, so losing 334 still means the city has “a lot of employees here.” She remains hopeful that Oracle’s continued investment in cloud infrastructure will secure its home in Silicon Valley, and that future Oracle layoffs will be targeted at its health care units elsewhere.
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