Playlist: Big tech layoffs in 2026 as employers cite AI

Oracle revealed on Monday that it has reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a 13% decrease, meaning more cuts than previously known, including jobs eliminated due to artificial intelligence. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations has led, and may continue to cause, reductions in our workforce,” the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing.

The revelation puts new numbers on what to many in the tech industry looks like an epidemic: companies are reporting record revenues while simultaneously culling their workforces, citing artificial intelligence as the engine of growth and the reason for the cutbacks. Tech layoffs hit their highest month in years in May, with artificial intelligence the most cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

We recently wrote about why this rationale is something companies may want to rethink, not least because for many of these companies, the headcount they are now cutting was set during a pandemic hiring wave, raising questions about what’s actually happening. Below, a quick look – in reverse chronological order – at the major tech companies that announced significant layoffs this year with artificial intelligence as a defining factor.

getlab – June 3, 2026. In one of the most recent cuts on this list, GitLab laid off nearly 350 workers, about 14% of its staff, to fund investment in AI infrastructure and handle increased traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said dealer workloads are “pushing competitors to the brink” and that the company has begun a “generational rebuild” of its core infrastructure to support what he called 100-fold growth demands. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers, and partnering with an unspecified 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 million to $35 million in restructuring costs.

Google – Ongoing until May. Alphabet’s Google has quietly cut headcount across its cloud division, including Threat Intelligence Group and cybersecurity staff associated with Mandiant, even as cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to more than $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has laid off more than a third of managers who oversee small teams, 35% fewer than managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never announced a single total number. The cuts have come through an ongoing performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural reorganization, with outside estimates putting the 2026 total at 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 toward artificial intelligence. CEO Sasan Goudarzi reportedly told employees that the company is working to reduce complexity and simplify structure, so it can deliver better products.

dead – May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (which it reportedly hates). Zuckerberg told employees that the cuts were necessary because “success is not a given” in artificial intelligence.

cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced the elimination of nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected earnings and revenue. “This wasn’t really a savings-driven restructuring… but more than that,” said CFO Mark Patterson [about] Reorganizing…resources around silicon, optics, security, and artificial intelligence.

Cloudflare – May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people), reporting quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year over year and the highest quarter in company history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the vast majority of those we laid off last week were people in measurement” — middle management, finance, legal, internal audit, and revenue recognition.

GM – May 12, 2026. GM is cutting 500 to 600 jobs, mostly in information technology positions in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it is reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that artificial intelligence played a role in the decision but was not the only reason. GM’s statement said it is “transforming its IT organization to position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still has nearly 80 IT positions open, including roles in artificial intelligence, motorsport and autonomous vehicles.

Coinbase – May 5, 2026. The cryptocurrency exchange said it would lay off about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing the efficiency of artificial intelligence. The company has flattened its organizational structure into five tiers under the CEO and COO, and said it will test “one-person teams” that combine engineering, design and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI has dramatically changed the pace of work — “engineers are using AI to supercharge what used to take teams weeks” — and that the company needs to “leverage AI in every aspect of our jobs.”

PayPal – May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut about 20% of its workforce over the next two or three years — north of 4,500 jobs — as part of a turnaround strategy focused on adopting artificial intelligence and regulatory simplification. CEO Enrique Llores told investors that the company will “aggressively embrace AI” in its development processes and has formed a new “Transforming and Simplifying AI” team that reports directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s operations “function by function.” Loris framed the cuts as removing organizational layers, and said AI will extend beyond programming into customer service, support operations, and risk management.

Microsoft – April-May 2026. Microsoft presented the takeovers structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees would be affected. Total headcount fell year-over-year in the fiscal third quarter, and is expected to continue to decline as the company focuses on “building high-performance teams that operate with speed and agility” amid increased investment in artificial intelligence, CFO Amy Hood said.

pop – April 16, 2026. Snap has cut nearly 16% of its global workforce — about 1,000 full-time employees — and closed more than 300 open positions, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing artificial intelligence developments as a key driver. “Rapid advances in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase speed, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company said it has already seen small teams using AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance and infrastructure efficiency.

IBM — extends through 2026. Between cuts in Q4 2025 and engineering cuts at Red Hat in April 2026, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. jobs eliminated, putting IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 above 15,000. Bloomberg reports that IBM plans to triple its entry-level U.S. hires for AI and hybrid cloud roles, even as it replaces nearly 200 jobs. For human resources with artificial intelligence agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a routine rebalancing exercise affecting a “low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce.

Atlantic – March 11, 2026. Atlassian cuts about 1,600 jobs (10% of its workforce) to “rebalance” toward AI and enterprise sales, even as shares rise nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people’. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.

Dale – January 30 (although revealed in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce fell about 10% in fiscal 2026 — roughly 11,000 jobs — to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 the previous year, with $569 million spent on severance packages. The cuts came as Dell forecast that AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.

oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As noted above, Oracle began telling employees it would be cutting thousands of jobs via terminal emails. The cuts came even though Oracle reported $3.7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations rising 325% to $553 billion — with savings redirected toward AI data centers. The cuts will later amount to 21,000 over 12 months, Oracle revealed in its annual filing on June 22.

roadblock – February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s company cuts 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce, down to less than 6,000 from more than 10,000. “We are already seeing that the intelligence tools we create and use, combined with smaller, more expansive teams, enable a new way of working that fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” Dorsey wrote on X. He added: “I think most companies are lagging behind. Within the next year, I think the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”

Sales force – February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics and its Agentforce AI unit. “Due to the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we have seen a reduction in the number of support cases we handle and no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles,” the company told Fortune. This followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer support jobs, shrinking that team from about 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “fewer employees” as AI agents took over the work.

Amazon – January 28, 2026. Amazon cuts 16,000 jobs at the company, after 14,000 cuts in October 2025 – about 9% of the company’s workforce in three months. The company said it was part of a “promotion[ing] We organize by reducing classes, increasing ownership, and eliminating bureaucracy. “As we roll out more AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” CEO Andy Jassy said in June 2025. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are done today…and in the next few years, we expect that to reduce the overall workforce in the company as we get efficiency gains from using AI more broadly across the company.”