They fired people for AI, now they fire them without AI. Please tell me how they plan on sustaining an economy where only the 1% has discretionary income?
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
846 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
82518 readers
4461 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
They don't need an economy. They need obedient workers
Control instead of trust, a problem as old as time. Trust would lead to prosperity, control, if not absolute, will always eventually fail - and it's never absolute.
load more comments
(2 replies)
But Oracle was building those data centers for OpenAI. OpenAI is going to be used by the Pentagon. Bailing Oracle out is now a matter of National Security!! If this has to come off of the taxes paid by the people they just laid off, that's unfortunate but.... have I mentioned National Security?
No, this week it's the children.
this may be one of the early signs of a burst(besides the economy falling due to that one war i think?)
I saw this and sound "holy shit" aloud. If this sketchy source is legit, this is probably pretty big. The stock market has been wobbly the last few days.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I was listening to a finance YT vid last night and the dude said if it wasn't for the enormous AI spend, the US would be deep in a technical recession now.
obviously the fault of immigrants and those on food stamps though /s
load more comments
(6 replies)
I hope oracle tanks and takes Ellison with it
I cannot wait for this bubble to finally burst.
It's gonna suck for the working class WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more than the people who will lose their fortunes as a result of the bubble popping
sorry
it always does
Michael Saylor, one of the biggest owners of one of the other "doesnt actually do anything" bubbles - Bitcoin - is a great example. He made a fortune during the dot com bubble.
With that said, if I have to eat hard tack and canned beans and use leftover charcoal from the park BBQ grills instead of toothpaste in order to never have another AI bullshit feature shoehorned into my existence, it might be worth it
This particular source seems sketchy, but the broader context supports the core of this story.
There was a report in January from TD Cowen that Oracle needed to free up cash as banks tightened up lending for data center deals, and that certain projects were on hold and in jeopardy of being canceled. That same report projected that Oracle might lay off 20,000 to 30,000 workers.
Then, just this last Friday, Bloomber reported that Oracle and OpenAI canceled their plans to expand their flagship data center in Texas as part of their $500 billion "Stargate" initiative. Here's the Reuters article describing it at a high level, because the original report is paywalled.
So everyone is looking back at that January report and seeing the recent data center news as confirmation that Oracle wants to free up cash by laying off staff.
Will this help lower ram prices?
Sucks to be in tech right now. I'm sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.
Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.
Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is "good with computer" to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.
And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It's particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.
I was laid off in 2019 by a large west coast tech giant as part of a mass layoff. We had the option of trying to find a new internal job but every job posting involved AI (seven years ago!) and nobody that I knew even got a reply from any application. Now I'm a school bus driver and 100X happier even though I make like 1/5 of what I used to make. The plot twist is that AI is probably going to replace school bus drivers sooner or later, flattened children be damned.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Easy win for companies that didn't buy into the hype. I'm the only dedicated software dev at my company, so there was no middle manager to foolishly think a chat bot could do my job. We are a small company that can compete with big players, and those big players appear to be floundering. Now, we are expanding.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
I called it a year or two ahead of time. Oracle will get bought by the federal government. Larry already has the fix in.
AI, at this point, seems to have been the single largest scam and money laundering scheme in history.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Yes, clearly it is the human staff that needs to be cut from the budget here. Fucking imbeciles.
I think this is two stories being mixed a bit here?
A bit over one month old, the lending issues: https://www.cio.com/article/4125103/oracle-may-slash-up-to-30000-jobs-to-fund-ai-data-center-expansion-as-us-banks-retreat.html
Now, confirmation of the cuts that were suspected since last year from Bloomberg: https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-plans-thousands-job-cuts-data-center-costs-rise-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-03-05/
I'm not saying there is not a link between the events, but somehow the posted article does a weird rehash mixed with news, and is not even dated, and I don't like that, so I'm sharing the individual news pieces as separate links for other's benefit.
load more comments
(3 replies)
You should be able to sue companies for gambling away their employees' lives like that.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Didn't see THAT coming, huh "oracle"?
The bubble popping seems inevitable at this point. Before the Giants were funding this by their core business plus loans backed by their core business. Now they've stretched their credit so much that no one's giving them loans anymore and instead of cutting back on the building spree they're making cuts to their core business.
They're betting that their customers are so locked in that they won't leave despite degradation in service. How deep oracle, AWS, googles hooks are in people remain to be seen, people seem to tolerate a lot of enshitification, but there's gotta be a tipping point. Once they reach that and the core business crashes all the rest of the dominos will fall.
that is why they are trying to peddle this to governments in EU, USA so heavily, they know they will take on AI at face value, instead of testing the efficacy of using AI.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(36 replies)
lol
Lmao, even
Rotfl, I daresay.
here comes the oh so predictable crash.
Hahahahahahaha! inhale hahahahahaha!
What does Oracle even do?
Charge people who accidentally used their Java SDK.
Create a db that sucks so bad you have to hire them to maintain it.
load more comments
(38 replies)
This looks desperate. They already sold $300B worth of data center capacity to OpenAI and this move will save them up to $10B.
They're supposedly depreciating their GPUs over 7 years. Apparently these data center GPUs are only used for about 3, as the generational improvements in efficiency almost dictate you replace them + the first stragglers start failing around that mark anyway
They could actually be proper fucked financially if they're cooking their books like that to seem more profitable than they are.
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›