The New Dark Age

Big Tech is not cutting workers because it is losing money. It is cutting workers while booking record profits — and using the savings to build the AI machinery it will own.

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are preparing to spend a combined $700 billion in 2026 on the AI buildout. That means data centers, chips, networks and power — the physical machinery behind the so-called artificial intelligence boom.

At the same time, according to TrueUp, nearly 150,000 tech workers have been cut so far in 2026 across 364 layoff events — an average of 967 workers a day.

The meaning is plain. Big Tech is taking money that once paid workers and turning it into property: machines, buildings, computer systems and power contracts controlled by the corporations themselves.

The cuts are not happening because business is bad. Meta posted first-quarter 2026 revenue of $56.31 billion and net income of $26.8 billion — the strongest quarter in the company’s history — and three weeks later terminated about 8,000 workers, roughly 10% of its workforce.

Oracle’s AI infrastructure segment posted revenue growth of 243% in its most recent quarter, with net income of $3.7 billion. Then it eliminated up to 30,000 employees — about 18% of its global workforce — to free between $8 billion and $10 billion in annual cash flow for a $50 billion data center buildout.

Amazon cut about 16,000 roles in January while reporting that AWS grew 28%, its fastest rate in 15 quarters.

Technology is not neutral when it is owned by the bosses. In their hands, every new machine becomes a weapon in the struggle over jobs, wages and control of the workplace.

This is not a story of machines suddenly making workers unnecessary. It is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Wages buy living labor. Data centers, chips and power contracts are dead labor turned into company property. Big Tech is using record profits and mass layoffs to replace workers where it can, speed up the workers who remain, cut wages and force the whole labor market downward.

But machinery does not create surplus value by itself. Living labor does. That is the contradiction inside the AI race. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into machinery that can pay off only if the companies find new customers, consume more power, pile up more debt, charge monopoly prices and squeeze more out of the workers who remain.

They are not only buying machines to cut payroll. They are building the private tollbooths other companies will have to pass through to use AI.

This private empire rests on public systems: immigration law, patent law, university research, tax breaks, power grids and government contracts all help Big Tech turn workers’ labor into corporate property.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince spelled out the logic in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published May 20, headlined “How I Choose Which Cloudflare Employees to Replace With AI.” Prince divided workers into those who build products, those who sell them and those he called “measurers” — the workers in audit, finance, legal, compliance, middle management and operations who track what the company is doing.

The vast majority of the 1,100 Cloudflare workers laid off last month, Prince wrote, were measurers.

These workers were not outside watchdogs. They were part of the corporation’s own managerial, legal and reporting apparatus. But even those internal human layers can slow decisions, raise objections, document risks or expose contradictions inside the firm.

Prince claimed that AI can monitor and report on the organization with greater consistency than human workers. In practice, that means replacing human review inside the company with automated systems trained, configured and evaluated by management itself.

The AI story also covers a wage-suppression operation. Many AI-attributed layoffs will not mean the work disappears. The same work can be shifted offshore, contracted out or brought back later at lower wages.

Oracle makes this visible. The company terminated up to 30,000 U.S.-based workers beginning March 31. Employees received emails at 6 a.m. stating that their employment had ended immediately. At the same time, Oracle held 3,126 pending petitions for H-1B guest worker visas across fiscal years 2025 and 2026.

The point is not that H-1B workers are replacing domestic workers one-for-one. The point is that Big Tech uses every form of labor insecurity it can find — layoffs, offshoring, contracting, forced ranking and immigration precarity — to push wages down across the whole workforce.

That pressure falls hardest on H-1B workers themselves. USCIS describes H-1B as a temporary specialty-occupation employment program. The worker’s right to remain in the U.S. is tied to the job. The Economic Policy Institute warned in 2026 that proposed wage rules would still allow employers to pay H-1B workers below-market rates.

When an H-1B worker is laid off, the clock starts immediately. They generally have 60 days to find another employer sponsor or leave the country. A layoff that means financial crisis for one worker can mean forced departure for another. Employers use that threat to underpay workers and keep them quiet.

The attack also reaches down the generational ladder. According to the Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute’s 2026 AI Index, employment among software developers ages 22 to 25 fell nearly 20% from 2024 levels, even as headcount for older developers continued to grow.

The entry-level tech job — once a middle-class on-ramp for a generation of technical workers — is being closed off before young workers can accumulate the seniority that protects older workers. The pipeline is being cut.

At the top of the same companies, compensation for a small layer of AI hires is moving the other way. Meta reduced annual stock awards for most employees by about 5% in February 2026, following a 10% cut the year before. At the same time, Zuckerberg’s AI recruitment drive reportedly offered extraordinary packages to a handful of highly paid AI workers. Median total compensation at Meta fell from $417,400 in 2024 to $388,200 in 2025.

The tech industry has long been hard to organize because the companies worked hard to convince tech workers they were not workers. High wages, stock grants, job titles and “mission-driven” company culture were used to blur the class line — the same old attempt to dress wage workers up as a “middle class” separate from the rest of the working class. But tech workers live by selling their labor-power. They do not own the platforms, data centers, patents or products their labor creates. When profits demand it, they are fired like any other workers.

On May 29, 2,100 information technology workers at the University of California voted overwhelmingly to join the University Professional and Technical Employees-Communications Workers of America Local 9119. Combined with the existing bargaining unit, the vote brings total membership to 8,400 — the largest tech worker union in the country.

The workers raised three demands: protection against layoffs, higher wages and a say over how AI is used on the job. That last demand goes to the heart of the fight. In every industry, the bosses claim the sole right to decide the methods, processes and speed of production. In Big Tech, they are making the same claim over AI: what gets automated, who gets monitored, whose job disappears and how fast work must move. The workers are saying those decisions must be fought over, not handed to the bosses.

The Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Local 9009, responding to Meta’s May 20 layoffs, connected its organizing directly to the pattern: “As Big Tech companies attempt to nudge ahead of each other in the AI race, our daily work lives are shifting.”

The union’s “Googlers for Job Security” campaign has organized around four demands: guaranteed severance, voluntary buyouts before mandatory layoffs, an end to forced performance-ranking quotas and the option to take severance as leave. The union credits organizing pressure with winning voluntary exit packages offered to over 70,000 Google employees.

The $700 billion AI buildout and the nearly 150,000 workers cut this year are not separate stories. They are two sides of the same restructuring. Big Tech is cutting workers, repricing labor and using the savings to build privately owned AI infrastructure that will give it greater command over the labor process.

Prince said out loud what the bosses are doing. Workers cannot answer that by asking the bosses to be fair. They need organization strong enough to fight layoffs, forced ranking, wage cuts, offshoring, visa coercion and the bosses’ claim that they alone get to decide how AI is used.

The question is not whether AI will enter the workplace. It already has. The question is whether workers will have the power to control how it is used — or whether Big Tech will use it to deepen exploitation under the banner of progress.

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