Amazon layoffs: 14,000 more jobs to go, AI cited
SVP: "The world is changing quickly..."
Amazon has confirmed plans to lay off 14,000 staff – citing generative AI as in part behind the need for it to be “organized more leanly.”
Announcing the layoffs, Amazon SVP of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti said that “the world is changing quickly.”
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).”
Amazon reported quarterly revenues of $167.7 billion in its last reported quarter. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky noted on its Q2 call that the firm was “committed to initiatives that further improve our cost structure…”
Various reports have suggested that Amazon has seen fewer voluntary redundancies than anticipated in the wake of its return-to-office mandate.
Decision comes as AWS margins slide
On the same call he noted that AWS’s margins had slumped from 39.5% in Q1 to 32.9% in Q2, partly due to seasonal compensation expense, but also amid “growing investments in capital expenditures in AWS.”
Cash CapEx for the single quarter was a colossal $31.4 billion, with investment in AWS “the primary driver as we invest to support demand for our AI services and increasingly in custom silicon…” he said in Q2.
“We will continue to invest more capital in chips, data centers and power to pursue this unusually large opportunity that we have in generative AI.”
See also: DeepSeek OCR explained
Galetti said today: “We’re convinced that we need…fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible” – Amazon will “continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains.”
The news is unlikely to bode well for what various forums, commentary pieces, and angry former staff suggest is an increasingly strained culture at Amazon – AWS watcher Corey Quinn even cited the cloud provider’s “brain drain” as being in part behind its inability recover swiftly from a recent outage.
CEO Andy Jassy also announced plans to cut 18,000 jobs in early 2023. Some 27,000+ have been impacted by layoffs between 2022 and 2024.
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