Oracle layoffs reach 'flagship' data center that it shows as proof OpenAI deal is fine

Oracle's layoffs on September 14 reached Abilene, Texas, the site the company has spent months holding up as evidence that its OpenAI partnership is on track. One employee there, an IC2 in OCI who says he joined on February 2, described the morning on r/employeesOfOracle: the termination email arrived at 5am Central, he did not see it, and he only realised what had happened when his badge failed at the gate.

His Slack was already locked. His last performance review had been "meets expectations". Another poster in the same thread said Customer Hardware Support was cut at Abilene, Phoenix and Ashburn.Abilene is not an incidental site. It is the flagship Stargate campus, the one Oracle cites when it talks about 200MW of operational capacity and an eight-building build running on schedule. It is also the site OpenAI has decided not to expand, preferring clusters with newer Nvidia chips, and the one lenders declined to finance with Oracle as tenant.

Oracle does not own it. It leases the facility from Crusoe on a 15-year deal worth more than a billion dollars a year.

Oracle has not commented on the cuts.

Oracle employees lost Slack and VPN before the layoff email reached them

The sequence was the same everywhere. Federated logins stopped working around 4am Eastern, Slack sessions dropped out between 5am and 5.30am, and the email from "Oracle Leadership" landed at 6am. Several people on the subreddit said they were locked out before they could read it.

One OCI employee wrote that his login let him in for a second, then booted him out. Another found out from a text sent by a coworker while he was walking home from a run.The posts ran through the morning across OCI security, CI/CD, enterprise engineering, observability, executive escalations, Fusion, NetSuite sales, Customer Success Services, Oracle Health, EPM, HR Technology and data centre compliance. Employees tracked the Slack member count as it fell, putting the US drop at roughly 3,200 against Friday.Oracle severance works out to 4 weeks plus a week for every year servedOracle is offering four weeks of base salary plus one additional week per year of service. The March version of the plan capped the total at 26 weeks. The latest documents do not state a cap.That formula explains the numbers circulating on Reddit. A data centre technician with eight months reported four weeks. Someone with four years in the database org got seven and called it a kick in the nuts.

An IC5 with 7.5 years got ten. By comparison, Salesforce's standard policy runs up to 30 weeks and Microsoft offered up to 39 weeks this summer.

Abilene shows what Oracle's AI buildout costs on both sides of the ledger

The money behind Abilene is what makes the cuts there awkward. Oracle reported $28.5 billion in first-quarter capital expenditure, against $8.5 billion a year earlier, and kept its fiscal 2027 forecast at $90 billion to $95 billion. It raised its restructuring plan by about $700 million on Friday, to roughly $2.8 billion, and tied part of that to AI adoption across some functions.Headcount had already fallen by 21,000 in the year to May 31, leaving about 141,000 staff before September 14. One employee on the subreddit, writing from Abilene, put it more plainly than any filing: he had previously worked at IBM and Microsoft, so he would be fine, he just had to get out of town first.