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.

Amazon Web Services said it was once again facing service disruptions in Bahrain on Monday, as a result of the ongoing conflict ‌in the Middle East.

“We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts,” a spokesperson said in a statement shared with CNBC. 

AWS advised customers to migrate their applications to alternate AWS Regions, and said it had already helped a large number of users to do so. 

It comes after the cloud provider reported service disruption related to the Iran conflict in Bahrain and the UAE earlier in March.

In the UAE, two AWS facilities were directly struck by drones. In Bahrain, a drone strike landed in close proximity to company facilities and caused physical damage.

These previous AWS disruptions caused reported outages of apps and digital services in the UAE.

In recent weeks, Iran has continued to launch missile and drone strikes on its Middle East neighbors as part of its retaliation against Israel and the U.S.

Amazon‘s data center in Bahrain was targeted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for the company’s support of the U.S. military, Iranian state media said Wednesday.

The company’s cloud computing unit said Monday that one of its facilities in Bahrain was damaged due to a nearby drone strike on Sunday. Two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were also damaged after they were “directly struck” by drones.

All of the facilities remain offline, according to the Amazon Web Services health dashboard.

The attack in Bahrain was launched “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities,” Iran’s Fars News Agency said on Telegram.

The incidents came after joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran over the weekend. Iran has retaliated against Israeli and U.S. bases across the Gulf.

Amazon declined to comment.

In addition to structural damage, the data centers also experienced power disruptions and some water damage after firefighters worked to put out sparks and fire. Some popular AWS applications experienced “elevated error rates and degraded availability” due to the incident.

AWS advised cloud customers to back up their data, consider migrating their workloads to other regions and direct traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE.

AWS announced its Bahrain region in 2019, and it hosts significant workloads for governments there. The company also operates a corporate office in Bahrain that is primarily for AWS employees.

Earlier this week, Amazon instructed all of its corporate employees in the Middle East to work remotely and “follow local government guidelines” amid escalating instability in the region.

Salesforce shares tumbled 5% in extended trading on Wednesday after the customer service software maker reported healthy results, although its fiscal 2027 revenue view trailed Wall Street projections.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:

• Earnings per share: $3.81 adjusted vs. $3.04 expected
• Revenue: $11.20 billion vs. $11.18 billion expected

Salesforce’s revenue grew 12% year over year in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended on Jan. 31, according to a statement. It’s the company’s fastest growth rate in two years.

The company has allocated $50 billion for new share buybacks, “because these are some low prices,” CEO Marc Benioff said on a conference call with analysts. As of Wednesday’s close, Salesforce shares had fallen about 28% so far in 2026, while the S&P 500 index had gained 1%.

Net income of $1.94 billion, or $2.07 per share, increased from $1.71 billion, or $1.75 per share. Adjusted earnings per share excludes stock-based compensation expense, amortization of purchased intangible assets and restructuring costs.

Current remaining performance obligation, a sum of contracted but unrecognized revenue and unbilled amounts that will be recognized as revenue over the next year, came in at $35.1 billion. The figure was higher than StreetAccount’s $34.53 billion consensus.

Guidance for the fiscal first quarter included $3.11 to $3.13 in adjusted earnings per share on $11.03 billion to $11.08 billion in revenue. Analysts surveyed by LSEG were looking for $3.00 per share and $10.99 billion in revenue.

For the 2027 fiscal year, Salesforce called for $13.11 to $13.19 in adjusted earnings per share on $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion in revenue, which implies 10% to 11% growth. The LSEG consensus had $13.12 per share on $46.06 billion in revenue.

In recent weeks, investors have become increasingly worried that generative artificial intelligence models might dampen major software companies’ growth opportunities.

On Monday, IBM stock dropped 13% in its worst daily performance since 2000 after Anthropic published a blog post saying its Claude Code AI tool for developers can assist with modernizing code written in the Cobol programming language.

During the quarter, Salesforce released an AI-enabled Slackbot assistant in its Slack team communication app for paying clients. The company also completed its $8 billion Informatica acquisition and announced plans to buy marketing company Qualified. Informatica, a data management software company, contributed $399 million in revenue during the quarter.

The company now sees $63 billion in fiscal 2030 revenue, up from a target of over $60 billion it presented in October. Analysts polled by LSEG had been looking for $59.07 billion. The new number includes a contribution from Informatica.

Five customers of ServiceNow moved to Salesforce’s competing product for information technology service management during the quarter, Benioff said on the TBPN podcast on Wednesday.

Salesforce has been working to expand adoption of its Agentforce AI technology for automating customer service and other corporate functions.

The company said annualized Agentforce revenue exceeded $800 million in the quarter.

Morgan Stanley analysts, with the equivalent of a buy rating on Salesforce stock, said in a Monday note to clients that conversations with partners “continue to indicate we are in the early innings.”

Meanwhile, Salesforce is seeing a benefit from its stake in Anthropic, generating an $811 million gain on strategic investments in the quarter. That’s up from $96 million in the year-ago quarter.

“I think we just put another $100 million into the new round,” Benioff said. We’re [at] about $330 million into Anthropic invested. It’s almost about 1% of Anthropic. And believe me, I wish we had invested a lot more.”

Benioff said the company isn’t doing all that it can with debt.

“We’re just very under-leveraged on our balance sheet,” he said.

WATCH: Investors are paying less and less for software earnings these days, says Jim Cramer

Software stocks made a comeback on Tuesday after Anthropic hosted its enterprise agents event, where it revealed new partnerships, quelling some investor fears that the sector could be displaced by artificial intelligence.

The AI startup launched new updates to Claude Cowork that allow companies to integrate the productivity tool into a host of enterprise apps, such as Salesforce-owned Slack, Intuit, Docusign, LegalZoom, FactSet and Google‘s Gmail.

Organizations can also deploy customizable plugins across sectors like financial analysis, engineering and human resources, Anthropic said.

Salesforce shares jumped 4% following the Anthropic announcement while Docusign and LegalZoom each gained more than 2%. Thomson Reuters‘ stock surged more than 11% and FactSet shares rose nearly 6%.

Analysts at Wedbush Securities said in a Tuesday research note that Anthropic’s event showed the competition risk to software from AI is “overblown.”

They argued that models aren’t capable of replacing entire workflows that remain “deeply embedded” in software infrastructure.

“The reality is that these new AI tools will not rip and replace existing software ecosystems and data environments with these AI tools only as useful as the data it can reach,” the analysts wrote.

Anthropic’s recent product rollouts have sent software and cybersecurity stocks tumbling in recent weeks as investors digested the looming threat of AI tools to those business models.

CrowdStrike closed largely flat Tuesday, but many of those stocks climbed higher. Okta and Cloudflare rose about 2%. Zscaler and Tenable each gained about 4% and SentinelOne climbed 3%.

IBM shares sold off heavily on Monday after Anthropic touted a tool that could automate aspects of a programming language run on IBM’s computers. IBM’s stock rebounded Tuesday, climbing more than 2%.

— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot and Kate Rooney contributed reporting to this story.