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The men who claim it isn’ t happening The strangest objections come from the people standing to gain most from the boom. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, whose company sells the hardware of the entire AI gold rush, calls the story lazy to its face.“ The narrative that connects AI to job loss for many of the CEOs that are doing it, it is just too lazy,” he says, asking how a technology that“ became productive and useful only six months ago” could already be clearing out floors of offices. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company makes the most famous of those models, goes a step further. Almost every firm cutting staff now points at AI, he says,“ whether or not it really is about AI”. What were those decisions, then? One plausible answer wears a central banker’ s suit. When money was nearly free in the pandemic years, the giants hired as though the boom would run forever, fattening payrolls by some estimates as much as a quarter to three quarters. Then Fed Chair Jerome Powell made borrowing expensive, the easy money dried up and the bill came due. Powell cut rates repeatedly before handing the chair to Kevin Warsh in May, and still the layoffs have not slowed, proof the cheap-money hangover was only ever half the story.

Job cuts in May 2026 attributed to artificial intelligence

Source: Challenger, Gray & Christmas

The cheapest money in the building So whose hand is on the knife then? Trace the spending and it answers itself. Oracle has poured more than US $ 70bn into the data centres that keep AI running, borrowed tens of billions to do it, and will not stop losing cash until 2030 at the earliest. The build-out across the sector now runs past US $ 700bn. Nobody puts up buildings like that for free, and the fastest money in any company is the wages it stops paying. Larry leaves no doubt about the aim. Oracle“ will build more cloud infrastructure data centres than all its competitors combined”, he says in a June earnings call. Gartner surveyed 350 executives running AI inside their companies this spring. The ones cutting the most jobs posted almost exactly the same returns as the ones cutting the fewest. The productivity miracle, the entire justification for firing anyone, barely shows up in the numbers at all. All of this stays abstract until a layoff has a face, and TIME magazine found several this spring. The magazine interviewed tech workers who said they had been laid off as part of AI-driven cuts. Among them was a woman who asked to be called Jill, afraid of what her former company might do if she gave her real name. She had worked as a technical writer and instructor for three decades, teaching customers around the world how her company’ s products worked. In her final year she had been told to write down exactly how she did the job so