Amazon Plans Another Wave of Layoffs

By Staff, Agencies

Amazon announced Wednesday it will eliminate roughly 16,000 jobs in a second wave of layoffs as part of a restructuring focused on artificial intelligence.

The first round of layoffs took place in October and affected 14,000 employees. Combined, the two rounds will amount to roughly 10% of the company’s office workforce.

Amazon tied the layoffs to the need to “to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”

The tech giant plans to “continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” it said in a statement. Further workforce reductions are possible, it added.

According to Reuters, the company is planning to close its remaining brick-and-mortar Fresh grocery stores and Go markets, as well as abandon its Amazon One biometric payment system.

Although the roughly 30,000 jobs cut across the two rounds account for just under 2% of the tech giant’s total workforce of about 1.58 million, the layoffs mark the largest downsizing in the company’s history, surpassing the 2022–2023 cuts that eliminated 27,000 positions.

In October, Amazon cited new AI technologies as driving faster innovation and has since committed about $40 billion to US data centers to compete with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others.

The announcement came just a day after UPS, another US-based corporation, said it would cut an additional 30,000 positions, largely because of scaling down its collaboration with Amazon. The delivery company already eliminated 62,000 jobs last year.

UPS made the announcement on the same day it reported earnings for 2025. The company’s net income amounted to $5.57 billion last year, down from $5.78 in 2024.