Over the past few weeks, several US banks have pulled off from lending to Oracle for expanding its AI data centres, as per a report.
They fired people for AI, now they fire them without AI. Please tell me how they plan on sustaining an economy where only the 1% has discretionary income?
They don’t need an economy. They need obedient workers
Control instead of trust, a problem as old as time. Trust would lead to prosperity, control, if not absolute, will always eventually fail - and it’s never absolute.
Obedient unemployed
First they need to destroy your income, then they can make you do whatever they want
But Oracle was building those data centers for OpenAI. OpenAI is going to be used by the Pentagon. Bailing Oracle out is now a matter of National Security!! If this has to come off of the taxes paid by the people they just laid off, that’s unfortunate but… have I mentioned National Security?
No, this week it’s the children.
If the banks don’t see the value in it, it’s only a matter of time
It’s always been just a matter of time
Once that glorified autocomplete turns sentient you’ll look like quite the fewel.
this may be one of the early signs of a burst(besides the economy falling due to that one war i think?)
I saw this and sound “holy shit” aloud. If this sketchy source is legit, this is probably pretty big. The stock market has been wobbly the last few days.
True.
The stock market (for tech companies) has also been falling before the war.
I was listening to a finance YT vid last night and the dude said if it wasn’t for the enormous AI spend, the US would be deep in a technical recession now.
obviously the fault of immigrants and those on food stamps though /s
We are in a deep recession?
The enormous AI spend isn’t going to me, or you, or anyone I ever met.
True, but line isn’t going down yet.
Because none of the checks they’ve kited have come due
Those damn immigrants taking up all of the best landscaping, slaughterhouse, roof tarring, and crop picking jobs.
Ironically the only jobs that Anthropic and OpenAI claim AI won’t take. All those newly minted AI billionaires and nobody to maintain their golf courses… How sad is that?
What good is being super wealthy if you can’t feel superior to other people?
I cannot wait for this bubble to finally burst.
It’s gonna suck for the working class WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more than the people who will lose their fortunes as a result of the bubble popping
sorry
it always does
Michael Saylor, one of the biggest owners of one of the other “doesnt actually do anything” bubbles - Bitcoin - is a great example. He made a fortune during the dot com bubble.
With that said, if I have to eat hard tack and canned beans and use leftover charcoal from the park BBQ grills instead of toothpaste in order to never have another AI bullshit feature shoehorned into my existence, it might be worth it
Yes, I am well aware that we live under capitalism.
The big bubble. May it pop before we do.
This particular source seems sketchy, but the broader context supports the core of this story.
There was a report in January from TD Cowen that Oracle needed to free up cash as banks tightened up lending for data center deals, and that certain projects were on hold and in jeopardy of being canceled. That same report projected that Oracle might lay off 20,000 to 30,000 workers.
Then, just this last Friday, Bloomber reported that Oracle and OpenAI canceled their plans to expand their flagship data center in Texas as part of their $500 billion “Stargate” initiative. Here’s the Reuters article describing it at a high level, because the original report is paywalled.
So everyone is looking back at that January report and seeing the recent data center news as confirmation that Oracle wants to free up cash by laying off staff.
I hope oracle tanks and takes Ellison with it
AI, at this point, seems to have been the single largest scam and money laundering scheme in history.
So far! Don’t worry, Silicon Valley will think of another new, even bigger scam in no time!
I believe the war industry will take it over for the next turn.
At least the banks are figuring out what we knew long ago.
You’d think they learned from the dotcom bubble and the hundred other times they gambled and lost. I guess it doesn’t matter when you just get paid back with taxpayer money.
Sucks to be in tech right now. I’m sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.
Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.
Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is “good with computer” to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.
And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It’s particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.
I was laid off in 2019 by a large west coast tech giant as part of a mass layoff. We had the option of trying to find a new internal job but every job posting involved AI (seven years ago!) and nobody that I knew even got a reply from any application. Now I’m a school bus driver and 100X happier even though I make like 1/5 of what I used to make. The plot twist is that AI is probably going to replace school bus drivers sooner or later, flattened children be damned.
They could, but you’ll likely be the last one to go. Those kids will likely kill each other without supervision, and the third time they have to drive little Jimmy to school because the bus AI didn’t wait 30 seconds, they’ll be so far up the administration’s ass. They’ll know what they had for breakfast.
my older bro as laid off as part of the first wave in '23 heard thier company got bought out and he hasnt found any job yet, he might be doing “investment or stocks though”.
ugh. I hate driving.
Easy win for companies that didn’t buy into the hype. I’m the only dedicated software dev at my company, so there was no middle manager to foolishly think a chat bot could do my job. We are a small company that can compete with big players, and those big players appear to be floundering. Now, we are expanding.
deleted by creator
we already seeing the effects of fresh graduates from college, and those that are still in. i wonder if any more reports of universities having low enrollments is going to be too big to ignore.
This is worse than 2008 and I remember back then I was let go and the other guy was not and we sorta debated which would be worse off. This is way worse though. I would say at least twice as bad at this point. Funny thing was no one realized the trouble we were in in 2008 it was really like 2010 by the time it was really felt. On hindsite they are going to be talking about the collapse in 2025.
I’m not an economist, so I don’t know shit about fuck (though most economists don’t either tbf), but some people are comparing this to the railway bubble. Shit’s (potentially) so bad that they don’t even have a comparison from within our lifetimes to point to.
I think this is two stories being mixed a bit here?
A bit over one month old, the lending issues: https://www.cio.com/article/4125103/oracle-may-slash-up-to-30000-jobs-to-fund-ai-data-center-expansion-as-us-banks-retreat.html
Now, confirmation of the cuts that were suspected since last year from Bloomberg: https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-plans-thousands-job-cuts-data-center-costs-rise-bloomberg-news-reports-2026-03-05/
I’m not saying there is not a link between the events, but somehow the posted article does a weird rehash mixed with news, and is not even dated, and I don’t like that, so I’m sharing the individual news pieces as separate links for other’s benefit.
I see you and raise you a class action for reckless AI spending: https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/oracle-corporation-orcl-class-action-lawsuit-seeks-recovery-for-investors-april-6-2026-deadline-contact-kessler-topaz-meltzer-check-llp-890e8c24
Thanks for doing the research
This behavior increases enjoyment and utility of the Internet. Thank you!
You should be able to sue companies for gambling away their employees’ lives like that.
You as in who, the shareholders that indirectly voted for it?
Fuck the shareholders.
Who is doing the lawsuit, some unrelated third party, the employees?
The people that were laid off.
Investors are already suing Oracle right now btw, of course the legal system wouldn’t have let them down.
Ah I see, that would be an interesting law. Maybe it will happen one day, and we will take it for granted like we do 8 hour work days.
It’s not unheard of, in certain cases in certain more civilised states it does happen.
The state should be able to sue as layoffs put strain on the social system.
Didn’t see THAT coming, huh “oracle”?
Note that the article is from the beginning of February.
Why did it take so long? You’d think these articles are staggered at the request of the owner So the small army he fired doesnt revolt
Fuckin explains a lot of the last month’s issues
Will this help lower ram prices?
This is technically job loss caused by AI…
More accurately its caused by AI Mania, not AI proper, directly, but yeah.
This is a very good point. I never had the discussion whether real AI, not transformer-based chatbots, would be a boon or a bane for human workers. I mean, we should already have data about it.
By ‘real AI’, I presume you mean AGI, a digital intelligence that is actually superior to human intelligence, ie, is more intelligent than the smartest human and has all our collective knowledge and is able to comprehend it and evaluate it more consistently than any of us… and also is thus capable of improving itself and becoming more and more superintelligent.
That is still scifi, that is not real.
What we currently call ‘AI’ is basically an extremely expensive, lackluster pantomime of that, that fools fools into thinking it is the other thing… mostly because it is sycophantic and very confident, ie, it uses well known ‘hacks’ in human psychology, where confidence, breadth of knowledge, usage of technical terms… you know, con man techniques … are confused for actual competence.
If we had a real AGI, it would be be capable of both hacking into all the military information systems of the world, and tricking humans into nuking each other… and it would also be capable of making actual novel improvements in software, hardware, engineering, physics, social engineering, etc, and could decide to be a kind of benevolent dictator of the entire economy, that it would command and control.
We have no capacity to model the morality that would emerge in an actual superintelligence, because we definitionally would not be able to keep up with attempting to understand how it thinks.
Thats where the whole ‘is AI the potential best thing ever or would it become SkyNet’ problem comes from.
… But we are not there yet.
We are at… basically, a very fancy autocomplete algorithm that can analyze huge datasets reasonably well, compared to an average human, but also makes all kinds of mistakes, hallucinates ‘facts’ in order to generate more coherent things to say, and these hallucinations routinely trick non subject matter expert humans into just going along with it, again, like a con artist, like a fast talking ‘influencer’ pitching selling you a course or giving you some kind of ‘advice’.
And currently, what is going on, is that we are pouring I think at this point trillions of dollars into ‘AI’, under the premise that it is AGI, that it will be capable of generating massive returns on investment and productivity increases…
… but the actual results are turning out to be, all averaged for everywhere it has been implemented… somewhere between a net productivity loss, to meagre productivity gains.
What that means is that the AI Mania is the biggest bubble, the most severe malinvestment of economic resources in the history of humanity.
When that pops, we basically formally transition into cyberpunk dystopia, technofeudalism.
AI is a tool, a device, a machine. Thus, it depends on how you use it, what you use it for.
Right now, we have a whole lot of companies saying they are laying off workers because we don’t need them anymore… this is broadly a lie.
People are being laid off because the economy, the real economy, is already contracting, basically due to the collapse of the US as the undisputed world hegemon.
AI, as a broad, socioeconomic force… is mostly a smokescreen, the ultimate promise of bread and circuses, that masks a gigantic wealth transfer and restructing of economic and political power.
AI as a tool can be used for good, in specific use cases.
But it broadly isn’t, because people are fooled by the conversation machine into thinking it can do things that there is no evidence it can do, because people do not understand its limitations and flaws, and then they plug it into their immensely shitty business processes, and just assume it will not break things when it tries to use them.
AI, as it currently exists, is essentially a false or trickster God of Capitalism.
No, by real AI I meant what we already had before and that now is “disregarded” as machine learning algorithms.
I know it is not the correct technical definition, but AI is mostly a marketing term anyway.
