Amazon plans up to 30,000 corporate job cuts across logistics, payments and cloud units

Amazon.com Inc. plans to cut corporate jobs in several key departments, including logistics, payments, video games and the cloud-computing unit, according to people familiar with the matter.

The terminations, expected as soon as Tuesday, could affect as many as 30,000 jobs, Reuters reported on Monday, citing sources.

Cuts on that scale would be the largest since rolling reductions in late 2022 and early 2023 that ultimately totaled more than 27,000 corporate employees, as Chief Executive Andy Jassy looked to cut costs after expanding rapidly during the pandemic. Since then, there has been a steady drip of more modest layoffs targeting individual teams.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

Jassy in June signaled that Amazon’s workforce would likely get smaller as the company increases its use of artificial intelligence to complete tasks normally handled by people. The comment touched off panic among workers, who trawled anonymous online chat rooms for insights about potential job cuts that often leak piecemeal, making it difficult to assess their full size and scope.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy wrote then in a memo to employees. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

In meetings and comments on internal planning documents in the last year, Jassy has indicated that the company should do more to automate work that could be put in the hands of AI tools, according to a person familiar with the comments. He’s also told colleagues that parts of the company remain unwieldy after Amazon’s pandemic-era hiring binge, despite the cuts of the last three years, the person said.

The company also ordered some corporate employees to move closer to their managers and teams, Bloomberg reported earlier this year. Workers were told to relocate to such cities as Seattle, Arlington, Va., and Washington, which in some cases would require them to move across the country, according to people familiar with the situation.

Amazon employed a total of about 1.55 million people as of June 30, most of whom work in warehouses. It has about 350,000 corporate employees.

Amazon shares have risen less than 5% so far this year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index advanced more than 20% over the same time period.

Soper, Day and Schreier write for Bloomberg.