Two records are being set at the same time, and they almost never appear in the same story.
Per layoffs.fyi, 126,488 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 across 274 companies, and it is still only August. The year is moving faster than 2025: roughly 763 people cut per day against last year’s 674.
In the same time frame, Americans filed 3.23 million new business applications. That is the highest first half in Census Bureau data going back to 2005. And the strongest growth is in the sectors most exposed to AI.
One line tracks people losing jobs to a technology. The other tracks people starting companies with it. They are rising together.
The cutting side
Oracle is the most recent example. The company has reportedly drawn up plans for a new round of layoffs this month, according to an internal document viewed by Business Insider. The article reports: managers were asked to submit lists of affected employees; cuts were targeted before the fiscal second quarter opens September 1, with some teams facing double-digit percentages. Oracle declined to comment.
And Oracle is one name on a long list: Meta cut around 8,000, Microsoft 4,800, PayPal nearly 4,800, Cisco just under 4,000, Intuit 3,000, Visa 2,600, with Uber, Snap, Coinbase, Cloudflare, TikTok, and Zillow all cutting this year too.
The cited reasons use nearly identical language. Oracle’s own annual filing, in its risk factors section, says “the adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” Cloudflare called it restructuring for “the agentic AI era.” Snap is using AI to “assist the now smaller workforce.”
The building side
While the list of layoffs grew, so did the filings: 3.23 million new business applications in six months. A record start, in a dataset that has seen a pandemic boom and two downturns.
AI restructuring may be why jobs are going. But the same technology is also helping people build new tech.
And it is not only builders who were laid off. This month, Jeff Dean, one of Google’s most senior executives, left to start his own company. Investors have put $18.8 billion this year into AI startups founded since the start of 2025, on pace to pass last year’s total. People with every reason to stay are leaving to build. People given no choice are building too.
Ideas were rarely the real barrier. Plenty of people have carried a startup idea around for years. What stopped them was everything it took to ship: infrastructure, engineers, payroll, funding, eighteen months of runway. Today, one person can get much further with much less.
It may not be the best time to work in tech. But there has never been a better time to build it.
We are following where this goes: stories of people who used AI to build something real, who turned a severance into a startup. Follow along.
