Mark Cuban AI job losses are a bill that Silicon Valley’s biggest names must settle directly with workers and their communities, the billionaire investor argued on Thursday, calling on AI companies to spend billions supporting towns and cities facing AI-linked redundancies.
In a post on X that drew more than 700,000 views within hours, according to Fortune, the former Shark Tank investor wrote that AI companies need to start spending money ‘to help towns and cities that may be impacted by job losses.’
‘Billions of dollars is a lot of money across towns and city programs. Across the major LLMs, it’s a cost of doing business,’ Cuban wrote.
Mark Cuban on AI Job Losses and the PR War
Cuban’s core argument is that the industry is losing ordinary people and that the price of that hostility will be practical, not merely reputational.
‘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.
He said the companies are losing a PR battle and have to start courting the public. ‘One thing I have learned is being hated is not good for business,’ he added, arguing that big AI companies ‘all suck at putting people first.’
Cuban also singled out creatives as a group that is ‘terrified’ about what AI will do to their profession. He called on companies to go to artists in Los Angeles and New York, talk to them face to face, and provide ‘financial and creative support.’ Paying famous people to endorse AI activities, he said, was a ‘dumb’ idea.
In the same post, Cuban framed the backlash against data centres as a proxy conflict: ‘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,’ he wrote, according to Fortune.
A Mounting Toll on Jobs
The post lands as AI-linked redundancies accelerate sharply. US employers announced just over 97,000 job cuts in May 2026, with employers citing AI as the primary reason for almost 40% of those cuts, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas as reported by CNBC. That share has risen from 7% in January, 10% in February, 25% in March, and 26% in April 2026.
‘AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs,’ said Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Columbia Business School associate professor of management Daniel Keum cautioned, however, that a company citing AI for layoffs ‘doesn’t necessarily mean that’s actually why those layoffs are happening.’
The scale at individual companies is stark. Forbes reports that Oracle acknowledged AI cost 21,000 jobs at the company in 2026. Snap cut 1,000 jobs on 15 April 2026 after chief executive Evan Spiegel told employees that ‘rapid advancements in artificial intelligence’ would allow the same work to be done by a smaller group of people, Forbes reported. The Business Insider article that surfaced Cuban’s comments also noted that at least 16 US companies have announced staff reductions citing AI-affiliated redundancies, including Cisco and Coinbase.
The backlash has spilled beyond the workplace. AI speakers have been booed at college graduation ceremonies, and the cultural friction appears to be widening. On the same morning as Cuban’s post, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman published a multipart critique of the AI industry on his Substack, concluding the backlash is not ‘normal skepticism about change’ and writing that AI companies ‘only belatedly did they realize that declaring that your technology will wreak devastation would lead to a public backlash,’ according to Fortune.
Whether Cuban’s prescription, billions in community investment rather than celebrity endorsements, gains any traction with the companies he is criticising may depend on how quickly data-centre opposition translates into concrete obstacles to expansion. The communities that host those facilities now have a clearer sense of their own leverage.