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Oracle is reportedly laying off thousands of employees, adding to an already long list of tech giants cutting staff while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI data centers.

Microsoft laid off 15,000 people last year. Amazon axed 16,000 jobs in January. Atlassian let go of 10% of its workforce as part of its AI pivot. Block shed 40% of its staff, claiming AI could do much of the basic coding work it needed. Meta, which has explicitly set out to create a godlike “superintelligent” AI, reportedly laid off 700 employees while boosting a stock incentive program for a handful top executives.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: Big Tech executives have long warned that AI would lead to job losses. They perhaps just forgot to mention those losses wouldn’t necessarily come from actual AI tools replacing human workers but rather from the same old boring Business 101 reasons as the pre-AI era: When you spend too much, you usually end up havingto cut costs.

Executives have been quick to tie their staff cuts to AI in the most oblique possible terms to avoid the harsher-sounding reality: Many tech firms overhired during the pandemic, and now they are being squeezed by higher interest rates, inflation and their leaders’ own decisions to gamble on vague projections of AI’s potential.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many of Oracle’s roughly 162,000 staff were affected. CNBC, citing two people familiar with the matter, put the number in the “thousands,” and TD Cowen analysts recently projected Oracle would lay off up to 30,000 people — among other measures — to shore up its finances. Oracle declined to comment.

So while we don’t yet know what Oracle’s strategy is with the layoffs, we know that the company badly needs cash. It’s been trying to remake itself into an AI power player on par with Microsoft and Amazon.

That plan hinges on an expensive endeavor: building data centers to power AI services for customers like OpenAI. Last month, Oracle pledged to raise up to $50 billion this year through a mix of debt and equity.

In the early days of AI fervor on Wall Street, investorscheered Oracle’s ambition, sending the stock up 50% in 2023 and 60% in 2024.

But as the company has taken on billions in debt and buildout costs for data centers have gone up, the mood has shifted. Oracle’s stock (ORCL) has fallen 54% since its September peak. Several banks have pulled back from lending to Oracle-linked data center projects, according TD Cowen analysts. And last week, a closely watched gauge of Oracle’s credit risk hit an all-time high, Bloomberg reported — another sign that investors are nervous about the company’s debt load.

Oracle isn’t alone in taking on debt to fuel its AI ambitions, but it has far less free cash flow than many of its rivals. And Oracle is also concentrating its AI future on one giant customer, OpenAI, which has never turned a profit and is itself in the middle of a strategic revamp to widen the gap with rival Anthropic.

Bottom line: The white collar “bloodbath” forecast by tech luminaries has long been presented as the inevitable result of widespread AI adoption that makes typical computer jobs obsolete. There’s no evidence AI is meaningfully replacing workers at scale, however. So far, the only major labor disruption has come from company leaders who have tied their businesses to a technology that has yet to live up to its own hype.