Amazon might slash thousands more jobs

Amazon $AMZN is reportedly preparing to eliminate thousands more corporate roles as early as next week, extending one of the largest white-collar workforce reductions in its history.

Sources close to the matter told Reuters the cuts would bring Amazon’s total corporate job reductions to around 30,000 roles, following a first round of about 14,000 layoffs in October. The next wave is expected to be of a similar size and could begin as soon as Tuesday.

If carried out as planned, the reductions would amount to roughly 10% of Amazon’s corporate workforce; the company continues to employ more than 1.5 million people globally, most of them in warehouses and logistics rather than office roles.

The cuts are expected to span multiple parts of the business, including Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video, and human resources. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the plans.

Amazon had framed the round of October layoffs as part of a push to use artificial intelligence to automate internal work and move faster.

In an internal message last year, the company reportedly said, "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."

CEO Andy Jassy had said earlier in 2025 that he expected Amazon’s corporate workforce to reduce over time due to AI-related efficiencies. The remarks put Amazon squarely in the middle of a broader corporate trend: companies are using AI not just to build new products, but to justify leaner white-collar teams. From software coding to customer support to internal operations, executives are increasingly arguing that automation can replace or compress entire categories of corporate work. A survey by Resume.org found that four in 10 companies will replace some workers with AI in 2026.

But Jessy has also been explicit that the effort is as much about management layers as it is about machines.

During during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Jassy said the decision is “not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven," but rather, "it’s culture."

“You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers," he said. Amazon had become too complex, with too many layers of management and bureaucracy, he said. The goal, is to make teams smaller and decision-making faster, he added, a familiar refrain across Big Tech after years of pandemic-era hiring and subsequent cost cutting.

The planned reductions would surpass Amazon’s previous record layoffs in 2022, when the company cut about 27,000 roles amid a tech-sector slowdown.

Amazon is just one of several companies that have already announced plans for layoffs in 2026. These include 5,450 layoffs across Meta $META, Citi, BlackRock $BLK, Macy's $M, and logistics and warehousing firms. Microsoft $MSFT has faced talk of large workforce reductions, though company leadership has publicly denied broad layoffs.

“AI adoption is going to reshape the job market more dramatically over the next 18 to 24 months than we’ve seen in decades," said Kara Dennison, head of career advising at Resume.org. "We’ll see continued displacement of routine and process-driven roles as well as entirely new categories of work centered on AI oversight, data ethics, prompt engineering, and human-AI collaboration."

Last year saw the slowest annual job growth since 2003. Employers also cut more than 1.1 million jobs through November, the most since 2020, and a 54% increase from the same period a year prior, according to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. This included more than 60,000 jobs cuts across Amazon, UPS, and Target $TGT, announced in October last year.