140,000 Tech Jobs Gone in 2026, and the Market Doesn't Buy the AI Excuse

140,000 Tech Jobs Gone in 2026, and the Market Doesn't Buy the AI Excuse

Monday.com told the SEC this week that it would cut roughly 20% of its workforce, about 600 employees, while projecting up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026 1. The Tel Aviv-based work management software company called the reductions part of an "AI-first" transformation. Shareholders have heard that framing before. And the numbers suggest they have stopped buying it.

Nearly 140,000 U.S. tech jobs have vanished since January, according to a Financial Times analysis cited by TechCrunch 1. Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone account for almost 50,000 of those cuts, even as they funnel what the FT describes as hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data center buildouts 1. The FT also found that companies citing AI as a factor in their layoff announcements have underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following the announcement 1.

Ten percentage points of relative underperformance in a single month is not noise. It is the market pricing these announcements as restructuring wrapped in a fashionable rationale.

The company-by-company details reinforce that read. Oracle disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, attributing the decline in part to "the adoption and deployment of AI technologies" across its operations 1. Microsoft cut about 4,800 roles, mostly from its Xbox gaming unit, three years after acquiring Activision Blizzard for $75 billion, per the FT 1. Cisco eliminated nearly 4,000 positions despite reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue, with its CFO framing the move as a realignment "around silicon, optics, security and AI" rather than a cost-saving measure 1. Cloudflare cut 20% of its staff, 1,100 people, in the same quarter it posted the highest revenue in company history 1. Companies cutting from positions of financial strength are asking investors to believe the reductions are strategic, not opportunistic. The Nasdaq says no.

The counter-signal sharpens the picture. AI-focused companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly, absorbing talent shed elsewhere in the industry 1. Within the companies doing the cutting, headcount is often shifting rather than shrinking. Meta laid off 8,000 employees while moving roughly 7,000 existing employees into new AI-focused roles 1. IBM says it is tripling entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles alongside its recent cuts 1.

The divide the market is pricing isn't humans versus machines. It is companies putting AI to work in their products and headcount versus companies performing AI fluency for shareholders who can read an income statement.

Monday.com's filing sits squarely in that ambiguity. Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees the move was "not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI," framing it as adapting to an AI-first vision the company laid out roughly a year ago 1. The company expects $45 million to $55 million in restructuring charges but still projects up to 20% revenue growth. Projecting the same growth rate as your layoff rate invites a question: what were those employees contributing if the business hits its numbers without them? The market's answer, reflected in that 10% Nasdaq gap, is that the positions mattered less than the AI narrative their elimination was designed to serve.

The companies earning investor trust through this cycle are the ones whose AI investments show up in hiring and revenue rather than in press releases about transformation. Anthropic and OpenAI are growing payrolls. Meta is redeploying thousands internally. The market can distinguish between a company building with AI and a company building a story around it. The 140,000 jobs are gone either way. What investors are grading is whether the explanation for their departure holds up.