Amazon announced on Tuesday that it will lay off around 14,000 corporate employees, marking one of the largest workforce reductions in the company’s history as it doubles down on cost efficiency and artificial intelligence investments.
In a company blog post, Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, said the restructuring is aimed at making Amazon “leaner and less bureaucratic” while channeling resources into its “biggest bets,” particularly generative AI.
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” Galetti wrote. “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and businesses.”
The layoffs, representing around 4% of Amazon’s corporate and tech workforce, are part of CEO Andy Jassy’s multi-year cost-cutting initiative. The company has been streamlining operations since its pandemic-era hiring surge, when it added hundreds of thousands of workers to meet soaring e-commerce and cloud service demand.
According to Reuters, the cuts could eventually expand to 30,000 employees, potentially making it the largest corporate downsizing in Amazon’s history.
Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the U.S., had 1.54 million employees globally as of June 2025, including roughly 350,000 corporate and tech workers. Between 2022 and 2023, it already laid off 27,000 employees, closing underperforming projects and slowing hiring in non-core divisions.
CEO Andy Jassy has emphasized that AI will reshape Amazon’s workforce, reducing the need for some roles while creating new ones in emerging fields. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said earlier this year.
The company plans to continue hiring in key strategic areas, even as it commits to invest over $100 billion in AI development this year. Amazon’s third-quarter earnings are due to be reported on Thursday after market hours.
