Oracle rose in premarket trading on Wednesday as the multinational tech conglomerate looks to cut thousands of jobs to free up cash to build AI data center infrastructure.

The software giant has started telling its 162,000-strong workforce that thousands of people will be affected in a new round of layoffs, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC on Tuesday. Its shares were last up 2.6% in early market trading on Wednesday. Oracle declined to comment on CNBC’s report.

Investors remain uneasy about the company’s hefty capital expenditure on data centers that can handle AI workloads. While shares closed up nearly 6% Tuesday, Oracle’s stock is down roughly 25% so far this year.

The company announced plans in early February to fundraise up to $50 billion during the 2025 calendar year through a mixture of debt and equity, to expand capacity for contracted cloud demand from customers, including Nvidia, Meta, OpenAI, Advanced Micro Devices and xAI.

Major AI hyperscalers Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have also committed to capital expenditure of nearly $700 billion to fund their AI buildouts this year, which has alarmed investors as it will reduce the companies’ free cash flow without a clear promise on near-term returns.

Job cuts at Oracle will help free up cash flow, Barclays analysts said in a note on Thursday. The investment bank said it is its overweight rating of the stock.

“Given ORCL’s existing FY26 Restructuring Plan and prior reports, we do not see today’s layoffs as being a surprise to the market, which seemed to have appreciated the cost savings potential from ORCL’s actions amidst the company’s rapid build-out of AI infrastructure capacity,” the analysts said.

Barclays also highlighted that Oracle generates less profit per employee than its competitors, with workers less productive compared to the average. The analysts expect that Oracle will triple its revenue over the next few years due to minimal headcount growth and low operating costs.

AI robots will exceed the working population within a few decades as more firms adopt AI agents and continue to squeeze costs, a former Citi executive warned on Monday.

Rob Garlick, Citi Global Insights’ former head of innovation, technology, and future of work, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” that as leaders continue to prioritize profitability, their human workers will be left in the dust.

“We have a leadership system in the economic terms and business terms that celebrates profitability,” Garlick said in a conversation with CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick and Ben Boulos.

“When you marry profitability up with the technology progress, we have the biggest trade in history coming, which is basically that artificial intelligence will be able to do more and more, better and better, cheaper and cheaper, and that will be able to substitute for people.”

Garlick, who recently authored “AI – Anarchy or Abundance? Why the Future of Work Needs Pro-Human Leaders,” explained that his previous research at Citi showed that the number of AI robots is going to skyrocket as a result of these business decisions.

“We’re going to go over the next couple of decades to more moving robots than the working population, and then you add on agents, little agents, and it is going to explode,” he added.

AI robots ranging from humanoids to domestic cleaning robots and autonomous vehicles are forecasted to increase to 1.3 billion by 2035, according to a 2024 Citi report led by Garlick. The number of AI robots would quickly increase to over 4 billion by 2050, per the insights.

The Citi report even measured how long it would take for a robot to pay for itself through the money saved by replacing a human worker, for example, a $15,000 robot would break even in 3.8 weeks for a $41 an hour human job, or 21.6 weeks for a $7.25 human job. Meanwhile, a robot that costs $35,000 would have a payback time of 8.9 weeks for a $41 an hour human job.

“You can already buy a humanoid today, which gives you a payback period versus human workers of less than 10 weeks,” Garlick told CNBC, citing a figure from his book. “Humans can’t compete on this basis.”

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index report showed that 80% of leaders expect AI agents to be largely integrated into their AI strategy within the next 12 to 18 months. AI agents are a type of software program that can make decisions and complete tasks without much human direction.

Meanwhile, McKinsey & Company’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, noted that the company currently employs 20,000 agents alongside 40,000 humans, in an interview with Harvard Business Review. A year prior, the company only had 3,000 agents, and Sternfels predicts that in 18 months from now, there will be an equal number of employees and agents.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also shared similar views at the World Economic Forum’s flagship conference in Davos last month, saying that AI will likely surpass human intelligence by the end of this year.

“My prediction is, in the benign scenario of the future, that we will actually make so many robots in AI that they will actually saturate all human… there will be such an abundance of goods and services because my prediction is that there’ll be more robots than people,” Musk said.

Fears around AI replacing workers have mounted in the past year as major firms, including Amazon, Salesforce, Accenture, Heineken, and Lufthansa, have cited the technology as part of the reason for eliminating thousands of roles.

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director at the International Monetary Fund, told CNBC in January that AI is “hitting the labor market like a tsunami” and warned that “most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it.”

In the U.S., AI played a role in almost 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. in 2025, according to December data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

However, some leaders are striking a more positive tone. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang predicts that the “AI boom” will create six-figure salaries for the workers building AI and chip factories. Huang said the technology will boost skilled trade work, such as for plumbers, electricians, construction, and steel workers.

Pinterest shares closed nearly 17% lower on Friday, after the company cited tariff-related shocks in disappointing fourth-quarter earnings.

The social media company’s Q4 earnings came in below analysts’ expectations, with revenue of $1.32 billion compared with LSEG consensus estimates of $1.33 billion. Net income for the quarter plunged 85% to $277 million from $1.85 billion the prior year.

It also recorded $541.5 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or EBIDTA, below the $550 million that analysts were projecting.

Pinterest expects first-quarter sales to be between $951 million and $971 million, which is also below analysts’ forecasts of $980 million.

CEO Bill Ready said the company “absorbed an exogenous shock this year related to tariffs” and was more exposed to reduced advertising spend from large retailers.

Pinterest also announced plans in January to lay off less than 15% of its workforce and cut back on office space, in a bid to go all in on AI. It said it’s “reallocating resources” to AI-focused teams and prioritizing “AI-powered products and capabilities.”