Amazon plans to cut up to 30,000 corporate jobs
Amazon plans to lay off as many as 30,000 corporate workers as it cuts expenses and offsets overhiring during the pandemic’s demand peak, according to three people familiar with the matter.
That figure represents a small percentage of Amazon’s 1.55 million total employees, but almost 10 percent of its roughly 350,000 corporate employees.
This marks the largest layoff since late 2022, when Amazon began eliminating about 27,000 positions.
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment. Amazon has cut fewer jobs across multiple divisions over the past two years, including devices, communications and podcasting.
The cuts starting this week could impact various departments, including human resources, known as Human Experience and Technology, or PXT; operations, devices and services; and Amazon Web Services, people said.
Sources said managers of the affected teams were asked to receive training on how to communicate with staff following email notifications that will begin sending on Tuesday morning US time.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is mounting a push to reduce what he describes as excessive bureaucracy, including reducing the number of managers.
In early 2025, it said it set up an anonymous complaint line to identify inefficiencies, which led to nearly 1,500 responses and more than 450 process changes.
Jassy said in June that increased use of artificial intelligence tools would likely lead to more layoffs, particularly through automating repetitive and routine tasks.
“This latest move signals that Amazon has achieved enough AI-driven productivity gains to support a significant reduction in power across enterprise teams,” said eMarketer analyst Sky Canaves.
“Amazon is also under pressure in the short term to offset long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure.”
The full scope of this round of layoffs was not immediately clear. The number could change over time as Amazon’s financial priorities change, people familiar with the matter said.
Fortune previously reported that the human resources department could be targeted with a roughly 15 percent cut.
The program, one of tech’s most stringent, launched in early 2025 to bring workers back to the office five days a week, failed to create sufficient attrition, two people said, citing that as another reason for the size of the layoffs.
Some employees who do not work on a daily basis because they live far from company offices or for other reasons are being told they are leaving Amazon voluntarily and must leave without severance pay as a savings for the company.
Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks layoffs in the tech industry, estimates that nearly 98,000 jobs have been lost across 216 companies so far in 2025.
In all of 2024, this figure was 153,000. Amazon’s cloud computing unit AWS, its biggest profit center, reported sales of US$30.9 billion ($47.2 billion) in the second quarter; this was up 17.5 percent, well below the 39 percent gains of Microsoft Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud’s 32 percent.
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