Amazon may lay off 30,000 corporate employees this week, Reuters reports
Published in Business News
Amazon plans to lay off as many as 30,000 corporate employees this week, Reuters first reported Monday citing anonymous sources.
The layoffs, which Reuters reported are expected as early as Tuesday, would be the largest wave in the company’s history. Amazon previously had two series of cuts in late 2022 and early 2023 that ultimately resulted in 27,000 employees losing their jobs.
Amazon has conducted layoffs since 2023, but they’ve been in smaller cuts to targeted teams and divisions. The company laid off several hundred employees from its cloud computing division in July in a similar move to other cuts made in 2024.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
According to Reuters, the layoffs this week would cut would affect almost 10% of the company’s corporate ranks, a small part of Amazon’s overall workforce of more than 1.55 million people.
Such a layoff by Amazon would be the largest job cuts in the industry over the past few years. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, Salesforce and Oracle have all announced cuts this year, much as most of them did between 2022 and 2023.
Coming out of a pandemic-induced hiring spree, tech companies were trying to rein in costs amid rising inflation. On top of Amazon letting go of roughly 27,000 employees in 2023, Microsoft and Meta each laid off about 10,000. Google also cut about 10,000 jobs.
Artificial intelligence now looms over the series of layoffs in the tech industry this year. While tech leaders are boasting about the increased productivity and efficiency that AI tools bring, most stop short of claiming the tech is replacing workers.
Between May and July, Microsoft laid off more than 15,000 workers. The announcement rocked employees as the company was enjoying an unprecedented run of financial success. Amid the waves of summer layoffs, Microsoft reported it made more than $27 billion in profit between April and June with cloud computing growth that set off celebrations on Wall Street.
The company said that as it was exploring the next frontier of tech, it needed to streamline the business by trimming teams and shedding redundant roles. Microsoft’s also taken aim at manager ranks and stated a desire to prune the sprawling limbs of organizational charts.
Last year, when Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced Amazon would require employees in the office five days per week, he said a company goal was to reduce the number of managers within the company. Since then, he’s publicly blasted bureaucracy at Amazon and has even set up an email to which employees can send examples of what they perceive as unnecessary redundancies and red tape.
Earlier this year, Jassy told employees in a memo that he could see AI reshaping the company’s workforce as Amazon “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
He said it’s hard to know how or when the number of employees at Amazon nets out, but the company expects the workforce to reduce over the next few years due to AI-driven efficiencies.
Tech’s year of layoffs is also occurring in tandem with the industry’s massive upswell of spending, mostly in AI infrastructure.
Amazon’s expected capital expenditures jumped up to more than $100 billion this year, from $83 billion in 2024. The company is spending some of that to expand its rural logistics network, but much of it is going toward data centers and computer chips to keep up with the AI demand the industry is predicting.
Microsoft similarly boosted its annual spending during its 2025 fiscal year, which ended on June 30. The company said earlier in the year that it was on pace to spend more than $80 billion on capital expenditures, an estimate that ultimately came in under the actual $88.2 billion it spent, more than the previous two years combined.
That spending isn’t slowing down as Microsoft predicted this summer that it would invest about $30 billion on its cloud and AI infrastructure between the beginning of the July and the end of September.
Reports of Amazon’s planned layoffs didn’t say which offices would be the most affected.
The company’s primary Puget Sound headquarters holds about 50,000 employees in Seattle and more than 14,000 in Bellevue with a few thousand more in Redmond. During Amazon’s layoffs in 2023, more than 2,300 Seattle-area employees were affected.
More than 4,170 tech workers in the Seattle area have been laid off so far this year, according to state regulatory filings. Over 3,100 of them were Microsoft employees.
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