Amazon is slashing another 16,000 corporate jobs, the company announced Wednesday, marking its second mass layoff in just three months. The cuts bring total job losses since October to 30,000 - roughly 10% of Amazon's entire corporate and tech workforce - as CEO Andy Jassy doubles down on what he's calling an "anti-bureaucracy" mission while redirecting billions toward AI infrastructure. The move signals Amazon's most aggressive restructuring yet, trading middle management layers for machine learning models.
Amazon just dropped the hammer on 16,000 more corporate employees. The announcement came Wednesday morning via a blog post from Beth Galetti, the company's senior vice president of people experience and technology, who framed the cuts as necessary to "strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy."
But the real story is what Amazon's buying with the savings. The company's been telegraphing this shift for months - last October, it projected capital expenditures would hit $125 billion for 2026, the highest spending forecast among the megacap tech companies. That money's flowing straight into AI infrastructure and data center expansion, and Amazon's making room in the budget by trimming what Jassy views as bureaucratic bloat.
The 16,000 jobs disappearing now come just three months after 14,000 employees were let go in October. Combined, that's 30,000 corporate roles eliminated since fall - about 10% of Amazon's 350,000-person corporate and tech workforce. The company employs roughly 1.58 million people total, though most of those are warehouse and logistics workers who aren't affected by these particular cuts.
Galetti tried to soften the blow, insisting Amazon isn't establishing "a new rhythm" of quarterly mass layoffs. "That's not our plan," she wrote in Wednesday's post. "But just as we always have, every team will continue to evaluate the ownership, speed, and capacity to invent for customers, and make adjustments as appropriate." Translation: don't expect predictable cuts, but don't expect them to stop either.
