On Tuesday, October 28, 2025, Amazon confirmed it will lay off approximately 14,000 employees from its corporate workforce, marking one of the most significant rounds of job cuts in the company’s history. The move, which represents about 4% of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate staff, comes as the tech giant accelerates its investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud infrastructure while seeking to trim costs elsewhere. The announcement, delivered to staff by Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, followed days of speculation and media reports suggesting layoffs could reach as high as 30,000.
In her message to employees, Galetti acknowledged the difficulty of the decision, especially given Amazon’s continued strong business performance. “Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well. Across our businesses, we’re delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results. What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly,” she wrote, according to BBC. Galetti emphasized that this generation of AI is “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” enabling companies like Amazon to innovate faster than ever before.
Most employees affected by the layoffs will have 90 days to seek new positions within Amazon. Those unable or unwilling to find new roles will receive transitional support, including severance pay, outplacement services, and health insurance benefits. The cuts are confined to Amazon’s corporate division, sparing technicians, warehouse workers, and other non-corporate staff for now.
Amazon’s overall workforce, which currently stands at about 1.56 million globally, ballooned during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 alone, Amazon hired 427,300 new employees from January to October—a more than 50% increase from the previous year—as online shopping and home delivery surged in demand. But as the world returned to a semblance of normalcy, the company, like many of its tech peers, has been forced to recalibrate. According to Reuters, Amazon had previously slashed 27,000 jobs in 2023, with those layoffs occurring in two major waves.
CEO Andy Jassy has been at the forefront of Amazon’s cost-cutting and efficiency drive since taking the helm in 2021. In June 2025, Jassy made it clear that generative AI would play a central role in reshaping Amazon’s workforce. “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote in a statement published on Amazon’s website, as reported by Al Jazeera. He added, “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
The company’s focus on AI is not just rhetoric. Amazon has more than 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or already built—a number CEO Jassy described as a “small fraction” of what is still to come. In a conference call with industry analysts in May, Jassy stated, “If you believe your mission is to make customers’ lives easier and better every day, and you believe that every customer experience will be reinvented with AI, you’re going to invest very aggressively in AI, and that’s what we’re doing.”
To support this vision, Amazon has committed to massive infrastructure investments. Since the start of 2024, the company has pledged about $10 billion each to data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina. It also plans to invest $10 billion in building a new campus in North Carolina, all aimed at expanding its cloud computing and AI capabilities. These moves are designed to keep Amazon competitive with other tech giants like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, all of whom are racing to dominate the next wave of AI-driven innovation.
But as Amazon pours billions into technology, it’s also looking inward to root out inefficiencies. Last September, Jassy launched an “inefficiencies initiative,” including a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” where employees could report unnecessary bureaucracy and excessive processes. According to Reuters, this effort yielded about 1,500 responses and led to more than 450 process changes. Jassy also instructed leadership teams to increase the ratio of employees to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, signaling a drive to flatten management structures and reduce overhead.
Industry analysts see Amazon’s layoffs as a sign of broader shifts in the tech sector. Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, described the move as a “deep cleaning of Amazon’s corporate workforce,” telling AP News, “Unlike the Target layoffs, Amazon is operating from a position of strength. The company has been producing good growth, and it still has a lot of headroom for further expansion in both the U.S. and overseas.” However, Saunders cautioned that Amazon is not immune to global economic pressures and rising costs, especially given its hefty investments in logistics and AI. “In some ways, this is a tipping point away from human capital to technological infrastructure,” he said.
The specter of AI-driven job loss extends beyond Amazon. In July, Microsoft published research listing dozens of roles—such as interpreters, translators, customer service representatives, writers, and market research analysts—as especially vulnerable to automation. Conversely, jobs like nursing assistants, surgical assistants, and other hands-on roles are considered safer for now. Ben Barringer, a technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, told BBC, “We are already seeing jobs in software development be shed thanks to the capabilities of some of these AI tools, and the big companies will be looking to redistribute and restructure their workforces accordingly. They have the data and can apply AI in a way that unfortunately means job losses are inevitable.”
Despite the layoffs, Amazon continues to hire for other roles. The company announced earlier this month that it would bring on 250,000 seasonal workers for the upcoming holiday season, matching last year’s hiring spree. This stands in contrast to other retailers, many of whom are pulling back on seasonal hiring due to economic uncertainty and tariffs.
Amazon is set to report its quarterly financial results on Thursday, October 30, 2025, for the period ending September 30. In its most recent quarter, Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the company’s cloud computing arm—reported 17.5% growth, though some investors remain concerned about AWS’s slower pace compared to rivals Microsoft and Google. The financial community and the broader tech industry will be watching closely to see whether Amazon’s aggressive AI investments and corporate restructuring will pay off in the quarters ahead.
For now, Amazon’s latest round of layoffs underscores a new reality for workers in the tech sector: as companies double down on AI and automation, the very nature of work is shifting—sometimes faster than anyone expected.
