Oracle fired 30,000 people in March to free up cash for AI data centers. No warning. Employees got termination emails at 6am from “Oracle Leadership” — not from their manager, not from HR — a mass email from the void telling them their role had been eliminated and today was their last day. The company needed $50 billion for server farms, and the fastest way to find it was to stop paying humans. Call it what it is: a cash grab with a body count.
Here’s where it gets good. Those data centers need electricity — obscene amounts of it — and the grid upgrades land on residential bills. Virginia residents watched their monthly costs jump $16 because Dominion Energy had to build capacity for server farms. One guy in Northern Virginia went from $100 in December to $281 in January. Areas with heavy data center concentration have seen electricity prices spike 267% in five years. Seventy-eight percent of Virginia voters blame data centers for their rising power bills, which is less a poll result and more a utility company confession.
So the math is: they fire you to build the servers, the servers jack up your electric bill, and the company’s stock goes up because Wall Street loves a good headcount reduction. You subsidize the infrastructure that replaced your coworker’s job, and you do it every month, on autopay. The machine takes the work and sends you the bill.