Big Tech Layoffs Accelerate as Companies Increasingly Cite AI Directly as the Reason

The wave of layoffs at American technology companies that has run through all of 2026 is taking on a new character. More and more corporations no longer hide the reason for cuts behind vague talk of 'restructuring' or 'cost optimization,' instead explicitly citing artificial intelligence as the cause of layoffs in official statements and investor reports.

The scale of the cuts

The live tracker at layoffs.fyi shows 119,494 laid-off employees across 219 tech companies since the start of the year. TrueUp's count is similar, around 150,000 people, a 44 percent increase over the same period last year and an average of nearly a thousand layoffs a day. This data is compiled from companies' public announcements, so the real scale could be even larger, since some cuts never make it into official statistics.

The first quarter of 2026 brought nearly 82,000 announced layoffs in the tech industry alone, and March, with 45,800 cuts, was the worst month for the IT sector in over two years. That's a 580 percent increase compared to the last quarter of 2025, showing that the pace of cuts isn't slowing but accelerating with each new round of earnings reports.

AI as the official reason

The most striking shift, however, isn't in the numbers but in the language. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an agency that has tracked the American labor market for decades, found that in May 2026 artificial intelligence was cited as the reason for 38,579 announced layoffs, accounting for 40 percent of all cuts that month. Just a year earlier, companies almost never admitted to this directly, preferring to talk about 'adjusting organizational structure.'

Analysts cited by Polish and American media note, however, that AI itself is rarely the sole real reason. More often it serves as a convenient justification for cuts that would have been necessary anyway because of rising costs of computing infrastructure, on which the same companies are simultaneously spending record sums.

The main reason isn't automation, but the sharp rise in operating costs tied to infrastructure - Sridhar Vembu, co-founder of Zoho

Which companies are cutting the most

Topping the list of the biggest cuts in 2026 is Oracle, which eliminated roughly 21,000-30,000 positions, largely as it shifts funds toward cloud infrastructure for AI. Amazon laid off a total of 30,000 corporate employees (16,000 in January, following an earlier 14,000), and Meta parted ways with 8,000 people in May, about 10 percent of its workforce, while simultaneously raising its capital expenditure forecast for the year to $125-145 billion.

Microsoft cut 4,800 positions, Cisco about 4,000, Dell Technologies about 11,000, and PayPal more than 4,500 jobs, nearly a fifth of its workforce. Smaller but proportionally deeper cuts also hit Cloudflare (over 1,100 people, 20 percent of the team), Atlassian (1,600 people), Snap (a thousand people, 16 percent) and Coinbase (700 people, 14 percent).

The industry has found itself in a kind of investment vice - Arnav Gupta, Meta engineer

What's really driving the cuts

A TD Cowen analysis estimates that the Oracle cuts alone could free up $8-10 billion in annual cash flow, which the company will redirect toward building data centers and buying computing accelerators. A similar pattern is visible at Amazon, Microsoft, Coinbase and Block, which at the same time announced record AI spending alongside workforce cost cuts. In other words, the money saved on jobs largely flows back into the same industry, just in the form of contracts for chips and servers.

In Poland's context, a scenario of sudden, mass layoffs on the American model is unlikely. Polish labor law is far more restrictive than America's right-to-work framework, and carrying out collective layoffs requires consultation with trade unions and severance payments, which limits the temptation for quick cuts justified solely by AI adoption.

A more realistic risk for the Polish labor market is an indirect effect: global corporations shifting budgets from employment to computing infrastructure may also scale back contracts with Polish business services centers and outsourcing firms that have long handled back-office processes for Big Tech.

The trend doesn't look temporary. The next rounds of quarterly earnings in the second half of 2026 will show whether tech companies keep following the same pattern, simultaneous job cuts and record AI infrastructure spending, or whether the first signs of a slowdown emerge.