According to internal sources that are part of the initiatives, it is preparing to announce a major wave of workforce cuts that is expected in the next week, and forecasting about 30,000 corporate jobs to be wiped out by the middle of 2026.
This is after a previous move in October of 2025 that enabled the elimination of an estimated 14,000 white-collar positions or about half the amount projected, according to a report in Reuters.
Scale of the cuts
The loss of 30,000 jobs is a small percentage of Amazon’s overall 1.58 million employees around the world, but it would amount to around 10% of the overall corporate workforce, estimated by the analysts to be around 350,000 companies.
This number would represent the biggest layoff in the 30-year history of the company, which has witnessed an approximate 27,000 job losses in 2022.
What teams are under attack and preparing to battle?
According to sources, Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video, and the People Experience and Technology (HR) departments will be the ones cut, but specifics on how much each division will suffer are still unstable.
Most Amazon employees are still working in fulfillment facilities and warehouse environments, therefore the effects are congregated in the office-based teams.
The answer to why it is happening at Amazon?
In a company in-house announcement released last year, Amazon blamed the October layoffs on generative artificial intelligence, arguing that the technology is the most radical technology we have had since the Internet.
However, the key factor, according to CEO Andy Jassy, later told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call that the reduction was “not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven.”
Rather, he said,
“its culture,” meaning the company has too much bureaucracy. You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,”
The implication of this in the future
In case Amazon manages to trim down 30,000 positions that would mean a permanent change to a thinner, more AI-enhanced corporate identity, and not a one-off cost-saving operation.
To the workers, this would mean more expectations of productivity and more layers of management would be eradicated in the company’s hierarchy.
What it means to investors is that in an increasingly competitive cloud and retail environment, it is making more difficult choices to double down on high-growth areas like AWS, advertising, and AI-enabled services that should be favored over higher margins.
