Months after cutting 14,000 corporate jobs, Amazon has now eliminated another 16,000 employees.
In an internal memo shared with employees today, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, announced the fresh round of job cuts. The move comes just three months after the company laid off 14,000 corporate employees in October 2025, bringing the total number of job losses to 30,000 over the past few months.
We’ve been working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, Galetti wrote in the memo. She explained that while many teams completed their organizational changes in October, other teams only finalized the work now, leading to today’s announcement.
The reductions will impact approximately 16,000 roles across the company. Amazon says it will offer most US-based employees 90 days to search for new internal positions, with varying timelines internationally based on local requirements. For employees who cannot or choose not to find new roles within Amazon, the company will provide severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and other transition support.
The latest cuts come as Amazon continues to grapple with the organizational changes prompted by artificial intelligence. In the October announcement, Amazon explicitly cited AI as a driving factor, calling it “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet.” The company stated that AI was enabling companies to innovate faster than ever before, convincing Amazon that it needed to be “organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had foreshadowed these developments in June 2025, when he indicated that the company’s corporate workforce would likely shrink over the coming years due to efficiency gains from AI. “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy said. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
Despite the cuts, Galetti emphasized that Amazon will continue hiring and investing in strategic areas critical to its future. “We’re still in the early stages of building every one of our businesses and there’s significant opportunity ahead,” she wrote.
Addressing concerns about whether this signals a new pattern of regular layoffs, Galetti said: “Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.” However, she noted that teams will continue to evaluate ownership, speed, and capacity to innovate for customers, making adjustments as appropriate.
Before the current wave of job cuts, Amazon had approximately 350,000 corporate employees, meaning the combined 30,000 layoffs represent about 8.5% of its corporate workforce. These reductions come on top of the 27,000 employees Amazon laid off in late 2022 and early 2023 during a period of economic uncertainty.
Amazon is not alone in cutting jobs due to AI efficiencies. Salesforce announced it would not hire any software engineers this year because of improved productivity from AI, while Fiverr laid off 30% of its workforce as it transitioned to becoming an “AI-first company”. However, Amazon’s massive scale means these layoffs will have significant ripple effects across the tech industry, potentially raising concerns among employees at other companies about job security in an AI-driven future. The timing of these announcements — just three months apart — suggests that Amazon is moving quickly to reshape its organization for an AI-enabled future, even as it maintains that such broad reductions are not planned to become a regular occurrence.