Oracle has drawn up plans for a new round of layoffs this month, according to a Business Insider report citing people familiar with the matter. Managers have reportedly been asked to prepare lists of employees to cut, a sign the process is already underway inside the company.

The move would follow a brutal stretch for Oracle’s workforce. The company’s headcount fell by roughly 21,000 people, or about 13 percent, during the fiscal year that ended May 31, according to regulatory filings. That reduction took Oracle from around 162,000 employees to about 141,000.

The timing is not accidental. Oracle has borrowed heavily this year to fund a rapid buildout of AI data centers and chip capacity, betting on cloud demand from companies training and running large language models. That spending has piled up debt even as revenue from AI infrastructure deals has not yet caught up.

Employees have been sharing accounts of the cuts on forums like Reddit and Blind, describing abrupt departures and thin explanations from managers. One post on r/technology drew more than 200 comments within hours, many from workers describing similar experiences during Oracle’s earlier layoff rounds this year.

Oracle has not issued a public statement confirming the scope or timing of the new cuts. The company’s fiscal year 2026 results, released in June, credited AI cloud contracts for driving a jump in remaining performance obligations, the backlog of signed but unfulfilled deals that Oracle uses to reassure investors about future revenue.

Wall Street has largely rewarded that bet so far, with Oracle stock trading well above where it started the year. But the layoffs suggest the company is trying to control costs on the personnel side even as it keeps spending aggressively on infrastructure, a tension playing out across much of the tech industry this year.

What happens next depends on how quickly Oracle moves. Reports suggest the cuts could land before mid September, though the company has given no formal timeline.