IT hiring split widens

India’s biggest information technology services company is still hiring graduates, even as Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs while pouring money into artificial intelligence infrastructure. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (cnbc.com) Tata Consultancy Services said on April 13 that it has already made 25,000 campus offers in India and still expects to hire about 40,000 fresh graduates a year. The company said its total headcount fell by 23,460 in fiscal 2026 to 584,519 employees, although it added 2,356 employees in the March quarter. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Tata Consultancy Services chief human resources officer Sudeep Kunnumal said hiring is being steered toward “future-ready” skills such as artificial intelligence, advisory and consulting. The company also said learning intensity rose 25% year over year as it pushed capability building during the shift from pilot projects to larger artificial intelligence deployments. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Oracle, by contrast, has started telling employees it is cutting thousands of jobs, CNBC reported on March 31, citing people familiar with the matter. Oracle had 162,000 employees as of May 2025, and CNBC said analysts at TD Cowen estimated that cutting 20,000 to 30,000 jobs could add $8 billion to $10 billion in free cash flow. (cnbc.com) The cuts come as Oracle increases spending on data centers built to handle artificial intelligence workloads. Oracle said in June 2025 that fiscal 2025 revenue rose 8% to $57.4 billion, cloud revenue grew 24%, and cloud infrastructure revenue grew 50%, while executives forecast even faster cloud growth in fiscal 2026. (investor.oracle.com) (cnbc.com) That leaves two large employers reacting to the same artificial intelligence buildout in different ways. Tata Consultancy Services is using campus hiring and retraining to reshape its bench, while Oracle is trimming payroll as it funds a capital-heavy cloud expansion. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (cnbc.com) (investor.oracle.com) The split also reflects how their businesses make money. Tata Consultancy Services sells labor-intensive technology services to corporate clients, while Oracle sells software and cloud capacity and is spending heavily on the computing, power and buildings needed to run artificial intelligence systems. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (investor.oracle.com) (cnbc.com) Tata Consultancy Services said last year’s restructuring was concentrated in mid-level and senior roles and was not driven by artificial intelligence alone. Oracle declined to comment to CNBC on the latest layoff round. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (cnbc.com) For graduates and technology workers, the immediate signal is uneven rather than broad-based. Entry-level hiring is still open at some big services firms, but other large employers are cutting costs to finance the next phase of artificial intelligence spending. (telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (cnbc.com)