Amazon is gearing up to lay off as many as 14,000 white-collar workers, with cuts starting as soon as next Tuesday.
Reuters reports that jobs at cloud division Amazon Web Services are among those at risk, along with retail, Prime Video, and human resources units.
The cuts follow layoffs at AWS last July, which impacted hundreds, and broader company-wide cuts in October, which affected around 14,000 employees.
Following those layoffs, an internal Amazon letter said that “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.”
But in a third-quarter earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said that layoffs were “not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven.”
Instead, he said that it was about cutting bureaucracy. “You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers," he said.
Across the two waves of ~14,000 layoffs, the losses would equate to around 10 percent of Amazon's corporate workforce departing.
In the last quarter, the company reported a net income of $21.2 billion.
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