Oracle’s annual filing cited AI adoption among the drivers of 21,000 job cuts in fiscal 2026. Snap cut 1,000 people and the CEO said rapid AI advances meant a smaller team could do the same work. At college graduation ceremonies this spring, speakers who brought up AI got booed.By May, Challenger, Gray and Christmas found AI was the primary reason cited for nearly 40% of U.S. job cuts. In January it was 7%. Mark Cuban had been watching this play out and posted on X. It drew nearly 2 million views.What Mark Cuban said AI companies owe workers and communitiesThe post, covered by Fortune within hours of going up, was blunt. Cuban said major AI companies have already lost the public relations battle. They keep talking about the technology and ignoring the people most threatened by it. He told them what to do: go to the towns losing jobs and ask what they need.”Billions of dollars is a lot of money across towns and city programs. Across the major LLMs, it’s a cost of doing business,” he wrote on X.”One thing I have learned is being hated is not good for business,” he wrote, adding that big AI companies “all suck at putting people first.”More Layoffs:JPMorgan Chase pushes fraud division layoffs, despite rising revenuesAnother major fintech firm cutting 10% of its workforceReal estate tech firm exits key hub, cuts 100s of jobsHe told companies to skip the celebrities and stop buying politicians. Neither works, he said. Instead, go to working artists and creative unions in Los Angeles and New York, not the studios, and ask directly what financial and creative support would look like. Then actually do it.”Given the number of data centers and power that is needed, today and going forward, if you don’t kiss the asses of the people that go to work every day, and are just trying to pay their bills, you will fall far far short of the capacity you need to make your business work,” he wrote.Why Cuban says data center protests are really about something else”It’s time for everyone to realize that the fight against data centers has nothing to do with data centers. They have become a proxy for the hate towards AI and the concentration and accumulation of wealth it’s creating,” Cuban wrote.At least 75 data center projects worth roughly $130 billion were blocked or delayed in Q1 2026 alone, the worst quarter on record, according to Benzinga.A Gallup survey from May found 71% of Americans oppose AI data centers near their communities. Nearly half strongly oppose them. Residents cited power use, water consumption, noise, and rising utility bills.Residents aren’t fighting the buildings. They’re fighting what the buildings represent: AI wealth concentrating at the top while their jobs disappear.
At least 16 U.S. companies have announced layoffs citing AI redundancies in 2026Andrey/Getty Images
The AI job loss numbers Cuban is pointing toAt least 16 U.S. companies have announced layoffs citing AI redundancies in 2026, including Snap, Cisco, and Coinbase, as TheStreet reported. AI went from 7% of cited layoff reasons in January to 10% in February, 25% in March, 26% in April, and nearly 40% in May.”AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs,” said Andy Challenger of Challenger, Gray and Christmas.The same morning Cuban’s post went up, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman published a multipart Substack critique of the AI industry, concluding the backlash is not “normal skepticism about change.” Cuban himself thinks AI will produce net job gains eventually. He just doesn’t think companies get to say that while doing nothing for workers losing jobs right now.Why blocked data centers are becoming an AI industry business problemPew Research found 71% of Americans thought tech companies had a positive impact in 2015. By 2022 that had broadly reversed after years of social media controversies, privacy scandals, and frustration over concentrated wealth. AI is inheriting all of that.Seventy-five blocked data center projects in a single quarter is a capacity problem, not just a narrative one. If communities keep saying no, the infrastructure buildout that underpins most AI growth projections slows down. The Q1 numbers show it’s already happening.Cuban’s case is that community spending solves it. Companies that fund local programs and actually show up in the towns being disrupted face fewer permitting fights and cleaner expansion paths. The ones still spending on politicians and celebrities keep hitting the same wall, and the wall keeps getting bigger.Related: Mark Cuban has strong words on minimum wage and employers