Amazon eliminated fewer than 1,000 white-collar positions on Tuesday, primarily in the Stores division that runs its main e-commerce site, during the company's Prime Big Deal Days shopping event. The reductions hit parts of Amazon's customer service, marketplace support, and retail engineering operations, with employees in India, the US and the UK among those affected. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the cuts, stating "We've adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities." The company added that it remains committed to supporting affected employees through their transition. The latest action extends a pattern of smaller, targeted reductions that followed a much larger restructuring, with Amazon having eliminated roughly 30,000 corporate jobs between late last year and early this year as part of a push to flatten its organization and control costs after a pandemic-era hiring surge.
The job cuts come as CEO Andy Jassy prepares the company for a record $220 billion spending spree on artificial intelligence infrastructure, with the company simultaneously preparing to deploy this massive investment on data centres, chips, and other AI infrastructure. Amazon has been reaching out to former employees, including some laid off in earlier rounds, about open roles in AWS and its AI businesses. The stark contrast is evident: even as Amazon pares headcount in its traditional retail operations, it is pouring resources into the technology it views as the next major growth engine. The company has signaled that AI investments will dominate capital spending for years to come, with cloud computing demand driving much of the expansion. Amazon's retail operations have continued to grow, though at a slower pace than the explosive pandemic years.
The cuts followed months of unease among Amazon's corporate staff, with employees having been anticipating another round of reductions since the earlier layoffs. When notifications went out Tuesday, an internal Slack channel with nearly 37,000 members quickly filled with questions about severance terms, access to internal job postings, and whether additional notices were still pending. Some managers had been scaling back planning for upcoming quarters because they expected team structures or priorities to shift. For many employees, the immediate question was whether they could find another job inside Amazon before their employment ended, with workers asking about medical leave handling, Slack and Outlook access during notice periods, and whether outside offers during the 90-day notification period would forfeit severance if they left early. The uncertainty left employees parsing leadership meetings, calendar invitations, and team changes for clues about their future.
Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, addressed the broader workforce reductions in a Fox News interview aired Wednesday, saying the company had no choice but to trim staff after expanding too quickly during the pandemic. "People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us," he said when asked about the 30,000 positions eliminated in the earlier round. "The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our head count." His remarks framed the layoffs as an inevitable correction rather than a sign of business weakness. The latest layoffs come even as Amazon plans to increase spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure, with the company preparing to spend a record $220 billion on data centres, chips and other infrastructure to support AI and related operations.
Amazon is not alone in pairing job cuts with a bigger AI push, as reported by Reuters. Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 roles in May while shifting thousands of other workers into AI initiatives, and Microsoft cut more than 5,000 jobs across July and September. The layoffs to Amazon's retail unit coincide with Prime Big Deal Days, which began Tuesday and runs through Wednesday, offering varying discounts across several product categories. Amazon has also been approaching former employees for AI roles, with emails showing Amazon's AI agent organisation contacted former employees in August about openings in AI and machine learning. The outreach has reportedly been particularly visible in artificial intelligence and machine learning, where Amazon is expanding its capabilities, with the effort dubbed the "Swami's Boomerang Reengagement Initiative" after AWS vice-president Swami Sivasubramanian.
