Here’s what we know about the 30,000 layoffs Amazon is planning: positions, reasons, and timing

To add to the already struggling US economy and society, Amazon is preparing to eliminate up to 30,000 corporate‐level roles starting this week.

This reduction would represent around 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate employees, a staggering number given how large the company is, and marks the biggest layoff move at Amazon since late 2022, when about 27,000 positions were cut.

The cut affects several divisions including human resources, operations, devices and services, and cloud unit Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon expanded aggressively during the pandemic (when we resorted to sitting at home and buying online), and now it is scaling back once again as demand regresses to the mean and people are buying less generally thanks to Trump-onomics.

“Our headcount will reduce as our efficiency improves through AI ”

Reports say that Amazon’s leadership under Andy Jassy is shifting focus toward reducing bureaucracy and embracing more automated workflows. In a memo seen by internal staff, Jassy warned that greater automation and use of artificial intelligence mean the company will need fewer people in some roles and more in others. “It is hard to say exactly how this will play out over time,” he reportedly wrote, “but in the coming years we expect our headcount will reduce as our efficiency improves through wide-ranging AI use across the company.”

“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. 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,” Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience, said. “We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”

“This latest move signals that Amazon is likely realizing enough AI-driven productivity gains within corporate teams to support a substantial reduction in force,” Sky Canaves, an eMarketer analyst, told Reuters. “Amazon has also been under pressure in the short-term to offset the long-term investments in building out its AI infrastructure.”

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Despite this, Amazon remains quite large in total scale: those 30,000 cuts apply only to corporate functions, while the overall headcount remains around 1.55 million globally. Meanwhile, AWS posted second-quarter sales of about US$30.9 billion, up 17.5 % year-on-year, although that growth is slower than rivals such as Microsoft Azure and Alphabet Google Cloud.

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