Abilene, Texas, is where Oracle points when investors ask whether its partnership with OpenAI is real. Last week it was also where Oracle cut jobs.
The company’s latest round of layoffs reached the Abilene data-center campus that houses part of the Stargate project, OpenAI’s sprawling computing buildout, according to employee accounts reported across technology publications and discussions on Reddit. The cloud division bore the heaviest cuts, with roles in customer hardware support, engineering and data-center compliance among those eliminated.
Employees described a process that ran ahead of the official word. Several said they lost access to corporate systems in the early morning hours, with Slack sessions dropping and network logins failing before the formal termination email arrived. At least one Abilene worker said he learned he had been let go when his badge stopped opening the gate.
The site is not incidental. Abilene is the flagship Stargate campus, one Oracle cites when it discusses roughly 200 megawatts of operating capacity and an eight-building construction program it says is running on schedule. Oracle leases the facility from Crusoe under a long-term agreement reported to be worth more than $1 billion a year.
The cuts there carry a particular sting because the site has been presented as evidence that the OpenAI deal is working. Yet OpenAI has chosen not to expand further at Abilene, according to the reports, preferring clusters equipped with newer Nvidia chips. Lenders earlier declined to finance the facility with Oracle as the tenant.
The layoffs extend a pattern that has been running across the company’s US workforce. Tracking of internal Slack member counts suggested a reduction of roughly 3,200 people against the prior week. The severance offer runs to four weeks of base pay plus one week for each year of service.
The job cuts sit beside numbers that point in the opposite direction. Oracle reported $28.5 billion in capital expenditure in its latest quarter, up from $8.5 billion a year earlier, and kept its full-year forecast at $90 billion to $95 billion. It also raised its restructuring plan by about $700 million, to roughly $2.8 billion, part of it tied to AI adoption across some functions.
The company is spending and trimming at once. Headcount had already fallen by about 21,000 in the year to May 31, leaving roughly 141,000 employees before the latest round. The reductions are aimed at older parts of the cloud business even as Oracle borrows heavily to build the new one.
The borrowing is part of the story. Oracle has leaned on debt to fund a data-center buildout that keeps pace with Microsoft, Google and Amazon in the market for rented AI computing, a bet that the demand will arrive before the interest bill does.
The power question shows the other side of the ledger. Oracle said it is investing in ten wind projects across Texas that together will deliver more than 1.7 gigawatts of carbon-free electricity to the state’s grid, part of its effort to secure power for AI data centers. A company cutting support jobs in Abilene is simultaneously underwriting the electricity those same sites will need.
The wind investment is aimed squarely at the power constraints that now dictate where AI infrastructure can be built. Data centers need enormous amounts of electricity, and Oracle’s willingness to finance wind farms itself signals how tight the supply has become in Texas.
The model strategy has moved in the same direction. Oracle expanded its partnership with Google Cloud this year to bring Google’s Gemini models into its Fusion applications and NetSuite, giving customers a lineup that mixes Oracle’s own AI with a rival’s. The company has positioned itself as a buyer of models as much as a builder.
The combined picture is a business financing its next act with debt while pruning the workforce of its last one. Oracle has borrowed heavily to fund the data-center buildout, betting that AI demand will justify the capital. The layoffs are the cost side of that bet being felt in the places where the building is actually happening.
For the workers in Abilene, the cuts landed where the company’s most visible promise sits. A campus held up as the future of Oracle’s AI business was also the site of some of its most painful reductions, a reminder of how unevenly the AI buildout’s costs and benefits are distributed.
Oracle has not suggested the OpenAI partnership is ending or that it is retreating from Abilene. The company continues to frame the site as central to its strategy. But a round of layoffs at the flagship campus makes the tension hard to ignore: the AI buildout is creating a great deal of capital spending and a smaller payroll at the same time.
