Amazon is preparing a second major round of corporate job cuts that could begin as early as next week, adding to layoffs already implemented in 2025 and contributing to a plan to reduce about 30,000 white-collar positions, nearly 10 percent of its corporate workforce, according to people familiar with the matter. The company’s stock declined on the news as investors weighed the implications of this significant restructuring effort.
The upcoming layoffs follow an earlier reduction of around 14,000 corporate roles in October 2025, and analysts say the latest cuts could be of similar scale, impacting teams across key business areas including Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video and human resources. Although the overall headcount reduction represents a small fraction of Amazon’s global workforce of roughly 1.58 million employees, it marks one of the largest cycles of corporate layoffs in the company’s three-decade history, surpassing the approximately 27,000 jobs trimmed in 2022.
CEO Andy Jassy has framed the layoffs as part of an effort to simplify the organisation and eliminate excess layers of management and bureaucracy that accumulated during rapid expansion in prior years. During a third-quarter earnings call in 2025, Jassy emphasised that the cuts were not driven by poor financial performance or purely by artificial intelligence automation, but rather by a desire to reduce internal complexity and improve decision-making efficiency. “You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,” he told analysts.
The potential job cuts come against a backdrop of broader changes in how Amazon and other technology firms are balancing workforce needs with advances in automation and artificial intelligence, which have reduced the need for some routine corporate tasks and accelerated calls for organisational streamlining. Despite these developments, Amazon’s core fulfilment, logistics and frontline operations continue to employ the vast majority of its workforce.
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