Amazon is preparing to lay off up to 30,000 corporate workers, Reuters reported Monday, news that comes less than a week after internal strategy documents suggested the company would replace 600,000 workers with robots, artificial intelligence and other automation tools by 2033.
Key Takeaways
- Amazon, the second-largest employer in the country, is planning to cut as much as nearly 10% of its corporate workforce to “compensate for overhiring” during the pandemic, unnamed sources told Reuters.
- The news comes less than one week after the New York Times discovered the company has plans to use robots and other automated systems to do the jobs of up to 600,000 employees in the next eight years, rather than add real people to its roster of 1.55 million employees.
- The corporate layoffs could represent one of the largest job cuts in company history, potentially surpassing the axing of 27,000 jobs in 2022.
- A representative for Amazon said they could not comment on the Reuters report.
Contra
Despite reported plans to eliminate jobs higher up, Amazon has said it plans to hire the same number of seasonal employees it always does: 250,000 across full- and part-time positions during the end-of-year shopping season. Overall, American employers are planning to hire a record-low number of seasonal employees in the final months of the year.
Surprising Fact
If 30,000 people lose their jobs, the cut at Amazon will rank among the largest corporate job cuts in American history, almost equal with the 31,000 jobs eliminated by Boeing in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The Boeing mass layoff is the 10th- biggest in history.
Key Background
It’s been a big year for layoffs. By the end of July, job cuts at U.S.-based companies had already surpassed all of 2024 and, though September, employers had announced almost 1 million job cuts, more than any year since the pandemic hit in 2020, according to career services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Andy Challenger, the firm’s senior vice president, said the job cuts can be largely blamed on a stagnating labor market, cost increases and “transformative new technology,” like AI. Technological updates, including automation, are responsible for 20,000 job cuts so far this year and another 17,375 cuts have been explicitly attributed to AI. The government has laid off more employees than any other sector, followed by tech companies, which have cut more than 100,000 jobs in 2025.
Forbes Valuation
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is the fourth-richest man in the world as of Monday with a net worth of $238.7. billion. Amazon is ranked No. 5 on Forbes’ list of the largest public companies in the world, with a market value of $2 trillion.
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This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
