Amazon to cut 14,000 corporate jobs amid AI investment
Amazon hired as its delivery demand peaked during the COVID pandemic, meaning analysts anticipated layoffs. The company is also in the process of boosting its AI spending with a view to streamlining.
Amazon said on Tuesday that it would reduce its corporate workforce by roughly 14,000 people, as part of wider restructuring driven in part by the online retail giant's investment in artificial intelligence.
The company said in a note to employees that was also posted on its website that the cuts would help with "further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we're investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers' current and future needs."
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Restructuring after the COVID delivery boom
Amazon is in the process of adapting to demand that's slightly lower than at its peak during the lockdowns of the COVID pandemic, when it hired additional staff to cope with the spike.
Over the past two years, the e-commerce giant has been gradually cutting jobs across divisions, including books, devices and its podcast business Wondery.
Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, wrote in the note that the company would continue "reducing in some areas and hiring in others" heading into 2026.
Employees were told that most affected workers would be given 90 days to seek new roles internally; recruiting teams would prioritise such candidates, the company said.
How is AI investment impacting Amazon job cuts?
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in June that the adoption of generative AI would reduce the total corporate workforce at the company in the coming years.
The e-commerce giant is focusing much of its capital investment on building AI and cloud infrastructure, including building a $10-billion (roughly €8.6-billion) campus in North Carolina, one of four such data centre projects in the US.
"This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before," Galetti said.
The company is also vested in AI's growth, as it ploughs resources into generating its own AWS business that seeks to compete with other major players like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. An AWS outage last week showed how far the tool has spread, with disruption everywhere from Duolingo and Snapchat to popular online games like Fortnite and Gran Turismo 7.
Amazon has roughly 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million. Tuesday's cuts represent roughly 4 per cent of its corporate workforce.
It was the largest reduction since 2023, when the company announced 27,000 job cuts in two waves.
The company will post quarterly results on Thursday, with the last set of figures showing 17.5 per cent growth for its AWS cloud computing arm.
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