Amazon is eyeing mass job cuts across its corporate employee base.
The e-commerce giant is planning to cut as many as 14,000 corporate jobs, the company announced Tuesday. The figure would represent 4 percent of the company’s 350,000 corporate staff.
In a post shared with employees and posted publicly Tuesday morning, the company said it would offer most employees 90 days to look for a new role internally.
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The post suggested Amazon was not finished with layoffs going into 2026.
“We expect to continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains,” said Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon in the post.
A Monday report from Reuters initially put the headcount reduction figure at 30,000 employees, while a separate report from CNBC referred to the move as the “largest cuts to Amazon’s corporate workforce in the company’s history” that would span across almost all the organization’s business units.
Companywide, when accounting for workers in the Big Tech firm’s nationwide supply chain network, Amazon’s total workforce included 1.5 million full-time and part-time employees as of Dec. 31, 2024.
The Reuters report indicated that the mass layoff is due to Amazon’s focus on cutting expenses—a two-year endeavor at the e-tailer—alongside a need to reverse some overhiring that occurred during the peak demand of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The Amazon layoffs are dramatic in scale, and they represent a deep cleaning of Amazon’s corporate workforce,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, in comments. “However, they are the latest in a long line of efficiency drives which has seen Amazon focus its efforts more sharply in terms of its corporate divisions. While Amazon could never be described as a flabby organization, it has become more complex and layered over time and there is scope for some simplification.”
This would be the largest job cut across the company since the period from late 2022 to early 2023, when roughly 27,000 positions were eliminated.
Sourcing Journal reached out to Amazon.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has never been shy about cutting costs at the company he took over from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021. In June, Jassy told employees that he expected the efficiency gains from using AI to ultimately reduce the company’s total corporate staff.
“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy wrote in the memo. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
At the time, Jassy bluntly told employees that they would have to mull over “how to get more done with scrappier teams,” suggesting that staff prepare for some headcount reduction.
Amazon is making a massive bet on AI this year, with the company forking over $100 million in capital expenditures in 2025. The “vast majority” of the capex is on AI-related spending aimed at procuring data centers, hardware, chips and networking gear to bolster its cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jassy said in a February earnings call.
It is probable that the implementation of technologies like generative and agentic AI across the business could also result in fewer hirings down the line for the e-commerce giant, whether it be at the corporate or supply chain level.
The reported job cuts follow last week’s New York Times report, in which leaked internal documents from Amazon said AI, automation and robotics advancements could prevent the marketplace from hiring another 160,000 employees by 2027. The technology, which gets deployed across the firm’s warehouse base, could potentially lead to Amazon skirting as much as 600,000 hirings by 2033.
Jassy’s comments in the February call appear to fit this narrative, as he described the $100 billion capex figure as also including a “pretty significant investment” on robotics and automation, “so we can take our costs to serve down and continue to improve our productivity.”
A prior report from Fortune earlier in October indicated that Amazon was planning to cut as much as 15 percent of its human resources staff, and likely lay off employees across other divisions like its core consumer business.
“Markets across the world are tightening at the same time as underlying costs are rising,” Saunders said. “Amazon is not immune to this, and it needs to act if it wants to continue with a good bottom line performance. This is especially so given the amount of investment the company is making in areas like logistics and AI. In some ways, this is a tipping point away from human capital to technological infrastructure.”
Amazon’s move follows that of one of its top retail rivals, Target, which announced last week that it would cut 1,800 corporate positions. That culling amounts to 8.2 percent of the mass merchant’s 22,000-strong corporate workforce.
Like Amazon, that decision isn’t impacting roles in the supply chain or physical locations. The difference between cuts at both retail giants is Target has seen a prolonged downturn in sales that forced CEO Brian Cornell to step down from his role.
“Unlike the Target layoffs, Amazon is operating from a position of strength,” said Saunders. “The company has been producing good growth, and it still has a lot of headroom for further expansion in both the U.S. and overseas.”
For the holiday season, Amazon plans on hiring 250,000 people across its fulfillment and delivery network, but the company has not indicated how many of these staffers will be permanent hires.
This is the third straight year that the online retail giant has hired the same number of holiday employees. In 2022, Amazon had hired 150,000 workers in preparation for the holiday season.
The report comes out days ahead of Amazon’s third quarter earnings call, which will take place after the market closes on Thursday.
