January 29, 2026 Amazon said on Wednesday that it is cutting 16,000 jobs across the company. This would mark its second large round of layoffs in just three months as the tech giant restructures its workforce amid increased investment in artificial intelligence.
In a blog post addressed to employees, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said the layoffs are part of an effort to “reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy.”
“While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now,” Galetti wrote, explaining why additional cuts were needed.
According to Galetti, Amazon is not planning to establish a recurring cadence of mass layoffs. However, she did not rule out further workforce changes.
The latest cuts follow Amazon’s October reduction of 14,000 corporate roles, bringing total office job losses to roughly 30,000 positions, or about 9% of the company’s corporate workforce.
Amazon employed approximately 1.57 million people globally as of October 2025, according to its most recent filings, with around 350,000 employees in corporate roles. The company reported single-digit employee growth across the five quarters leading up to its third-quarter earnings and is scheduled to release its Q4 2025 results next week.
Despite the layoffs, Galetti said Amazon will continue hiring in strategic areas.
The job cuts align with comments previously made by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who has been candid about the impact artificial intelligence is expected to have on the company’s workforce. In a memo last year, Jassy said AI-driven efficiency gains would allow Amazon to operate with fewer employees in certain roles, while creating demand for different skill sets.
“As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy wrote. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
Jassy has also described the current period at Amazon as “a time to rethink everything we’ve ever done,” as the company competes with Microsoft, Google, Meta, OpenAI and others to build large language models and AI infrastructure.
The announcement followed an internal misstep earlier this week, when a draft meeting invite referencing job cuts and a project codenamed “Project Dawn” was mistakenly sent to several Amazon Web Services employees, according to Business Insider. The invite was later canceled.
Amazon has not disclosed which teams or regions will be most affected. But it confirmed that layoffs would begin Wednesday. Affected employees will be given 90 days to apply for internal roles, while those who are not rehired will receive severance pay and additional benefits.
