Amazon is preparing for another major round of job cuts in 2026, extending a restructuring drive that began late last year and underscoring how even the world’s largest technology companies continue to recalibrate after years of rapid expansion.
Last year, in October 2025, Amazon eliminated approximately 14,000 white-collar jobs as part of its initial corporate reorganization. The latest round is widely expected to target a similar number of positions, bringing the cumulative total toward 30,000 corporate jobs cut under this plan, a figure that would make it among the largest workforce reductions in the company’s history.
In 2020 and 2022, Amazon aggressively hired people to meet pandemic-driven demand across e-commerce, cloud computing, and digital services. That growth assumed a permanently higher demand curve. Later, Amazon also cut about 27,000 jobs in 2022–23, making the combined reductions over the past few years among the largest workforce resets in corporate America.
The fresh round of layoffs is expected to primarily affect corporate and managerial functions, rather than warehouse or delivery operations. Reported areas likely to be affected include Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail and e-commerce operations, Prime Video, and human resources teams known internally as People Experience and Technology (PXT).
While the overall reductions will represent only a small percentage of Amazon’s roughly 1.58 million global workforce, they could amount to nearly 10 percent of its corporate employee base, reflecting the company’s broader effort to simplify organizational structures and reduce layers of management.
Leadership has characterized this phase of restructuring as part of a longer-term strategy to streamline corporate operations. Although early communications about the October cuts referenced efficiency gains tied to artificial intelligence, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy later told analysts that the primary driver of the layoffs was less about cost pressure and more about reducing bureaucracy and improving organizational agility.
Amazon has explicitly stated that the layoffs are “not purely about AI,” and analysts suggest this is a second-order AI effect. Fewer managers are needed per team, planning, forecasting, HR, and program management roles scale less with AI tools and also decision cycles compress. This does not mean jobs are directly “replaced by AI,” but rather that fewer people are required to produce the same output, especially in white-collar functions.
A spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment on the specific details of the upcoming layoffs. However, in comments cited by Reuters, Jassy has stated that the goal is to reduce bureaucracy and simplify the organization, not merely to cut expenses. From an analyst standpoint, this indicates a move toward a leaner operating model more typical of mature enterprises than hypergrowth firms.
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