Amazon announced plans to eliminate about 14,000 corporate positions as it reorganized operations and increased spending on artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure. The reduction amounted to roughly 4% of its approximately 350,000 corporate employees and was the company's largest round of cuts since it announced 27,000 layoffs in two stages in 2023.
In a message to employees, senior vice president Beth Galetti said Amazon wanted to reduce bureaucracy, remove organizational layers and shift resources toward its largest priorities. She said the company expected to keep cutting in some areas and recruiting in others into 2026. The announcement therefore described a reallocation of work as well as an overall contraction in corporate staffing.
Most affected employees would receive 90 days to apply for other roles inside Amazon, according to the company. Recruiting teams were told to prioritize those candidates. The supplied evidence does not identify all business units, countries or job categories affected, nor does it give a timetable for when every departure would take effect.
The restructuring followed years of adjustment after Amazon expanded sharply to meet delivery demand during the Covid-19 pandemic. As that exceptional demand eased, the company made smaller cuts across businesses including books, devices and the Wondery podcast operation. Amazon's total workforce, including warehouse and logistics employees, was reported at about 1.56 million, making the corporate roles a minority of overall employment.
Artificial intelligence formed a central part of the company's investment case. Chief executive Andy Jassy had said in June that adoption of generative AI would reduce Amazon's total corporate workforce over the coming years. Galetti characterized the technology as the most consequential shift since the internet and said it could allow companies to innovate more quickly. The evidence does not specify how many of the 14,000 positions were directly replaced by automated systems, so the layoffs cannot be assigned entirely to AI.
Amazon was committing substantial capital to data centers and cloud capacity, including a $10 billion campus in North Carolina, one of four such US projects. Its Amazon Web Services division competes in cloud and AI infrastructure markets. The most recent figures cited in the supplied report showed AWS revenue growing 17.5%, and Amazon was due to publish quarterly results two days after the workforce announcement.
The cuts connected three pressures: normalization after pandemic-era hiring, a drive for a less layered management structure and capital demands from AI infrastructure. Amazon presented those forces as part of a long-term reshaping rather than a uniform retreat. Until more detailed notices were issued, the geographic and divisional distribution of the job losses remained unclear.
