Amazon say they are planning to axe thousands of employees as they mark the second phase of a restructuring push driven linked to the company’s new focus on artificial intelligence.
The tech giant said that they will cut about 16,000 jobs in a second round of layoffs, but have insisted that the move is aimed at streamlining operations rather than replacing workers with AI.
The first round of layoffs took place in October and affected 14,000 employees. Together the two rounds will amount to approximately 10% of the company’s office workforce.
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RT reports: Amazon tied the layoffs to the need to “to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” The tech giant plans to “continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” it said in a statement. Further workforce reductions are possible, it added.
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According to Reuters, the company is planning to close its remaining brick-and-mortar Fresh grocery stores and Go markets, as well as abandon its Amazon One biometric payment system.
Although the roughly 30,000 jobs cut across the two rounds account for just under 2% of the tech giant’s total workforce of about 1.58 million, the layoffs mark the largest downsizing in the company’s history, surpassing the 2022–2023 cuts that eliminated 27,000 positions.
In October, the company explained its decision by pointing to the introduction of AI technologies that are “enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”
Since 2024, the tech giant has committed about $40 billion to four data center projects in the US, as it builds up its infrastructure to compete with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others.
The announcement came just a day after UPS, another US-based corporation, said it would cut an additional 30,000 positions, largely because of scaling down its collaboration with Amazon. The delivery company already eliminated 62,000 jobs last year.
UPS made the announcement on the same day it reported earnings for 2025. The company’s net income amounted to $5.57 billion last year, down from $5.78 in 2024.
