Major Tech Companies Announce Layoffs Amid Cost-Cutting and Tech Shifts
The technology sector continues to navigate a turbulent landscape in 2025, marked by ongoing layoffs across major companies, a trend driven primarily by strategic cost-cutting measures and a sweeping reorientation towards artificial intelligence. While the initial wave of post-pandemic adjustments has subsided, the current job reductions signify a deeper, structural transformation within the industry, impacting giants from Oracle to Intel, and specialized firms like Nextdoor and Scale AI.
Since January 1, 2025, over 80,000 tech employees have faced job cuts across more than 170 companies, with July alone accounting for nearly 25,000 of these reductions. This sustained period of workforce recalibration, which follows significant layoffs in 2023 and 2024, is not merely a reaction to economic downturns but rather a proactive effort by companies to streamline operations and reallocate resources. The underlying causes are multifaceted, encompassing macroeconomic pressures, the imperative to boost profitability, and crucially, the accelerating integration of AI and automation into core business functions.
Intel, a cornerstone of the semiconductor industry, is undergoing one of its most significant restructurings in history, with plans to reduce its global workforce by 24,000 to 25,000 employees by the end of 2025. This massive reduction aims to bring its core workforce down to approximately 75,000, a quarter less than its 2024 headcount. Driven by successive quarterly losses and a strategic pivot towards becoming a “leaner, faster” organization centered on AI, these layoffs are affecting operations worldwide, including major projects in Germany and Poland, and shifts of roles from Costa Rica to Vietnam and Malaysia.
Similarly, Oracle is implementing job cuts within its burgeoning cloud infrastructure (OCI) unit. Reports indicate hundreds of roles, particularly in India and the United States, have been eliminated across various divisions including Enterprise Engineering, Fusion ERP software, data center operations, and even AI/ML project management. While some of these reductions are performance-related, the overarching strategy is to optimize costs and reallocate substantial investments towards building out massive data centers for AI. This strategic realignment comes even as Oracle aggressively hires for its AI data center expansion, highlighting a targeted shift in skill sets rather than a general slowdown.
The trend extends to social networking and specialized AI services. Nextdoor, the neighborhood social app, announced a 12% headcount reduction impacting 67 individuals in August 2025, aiming to save $30 million annually and achieve financial breakeven by late 2025. This move follows a previous 25% layoff in late 2023 and is part of a broader strategic action to ensure long-term sustainability, alongside a product redesign incorporating AI recommendations. Meanwhile, Scale AI, a data-labeling startup crucial to AI development, laid off approximately 14% of its workforce, comprising 200 full-time employees and 500 contractors, in July. The company’s interim CEO cited overly rapid expansion in its generative AI division and “excessive bureaucracy” as reasons. This restructuring also occurred shortly after a significant investment from Meta, which reportedly caused major customers like Google and OpenAI to re-evaluate their partnerships due to data security concerns.
Across the tech industry, the roles most vulnerable to these shifts are often those in customer support, operations, marketing, and generalist or mid-level positions, particularly where automation is feasible. Internal functions such as HR and recruiting are also seeing consolidation as companies increasingly leverage AI to enhance efficiency. This phenomenon underscores a broader shift where AI is not just replacing tasks but fundamentally reshaping job descriptions, demanding a new breed of “multi-hat” employees with adaptable, human-centric skills. Despite the widespread layoffs, demand remains robust for specialized roles in AI, machine learning, data science, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure, indicating a rebalancing of the tech workforce rather than a complete contraction. Companies are now prioritizing quality over quantity in hiring, focusing on candidates who can drive AI initiatives and contribute to a leaner, more agile future.