Amazon is preparing to cut thousands of corporate jobs as part of a broader plan to reduce its white-collar workforce by around 30,000 roles, according to reports from Reuters and Bloomberg.

The layoffs would represent one of the largest job reduction exercises in the company’s history and are expected to affect office-based staff across several major divisions, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video, and the People Experience and Technology (PXT) unit.

The reported move follows an earlier round of job cuts in October last year, when Amazon eliminated around 14,000 corporate roles. That exercise formed part of the same wider effort to trim roughly 30,000 white-collar positions, meaning a further wave of reductions is now expected to meet that target.

As of September 2025, Amazon employed around 1.57 million people globally, according to Bloomberg, the vast majority of whom work in fulfilment centres and warehouses.

Its corporate workforce stood at approximately 350,000 employees. A reduction of 30,000 roles would therefore impact around 10% of its office-based staff and would mark Amazon’s largest layoff in three decades, surpassing the 27,000 job cuts announced in 2022.

Employees affected by the October layoffs were allowed to remain on the company’s payroll for 90 days to apply for internal roles or seek opportunities elsewhere. That period ends on January 26, 2026, one day before the new cuts are expected to begin.

Reuters previously reported that the October job reductions were initially linked internally to Amazon’s increasing use of AI. In an internal letter at the time, the company described AI as “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”.

However, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy later downplayed the idea that the layoffs were primarily driven by AI or financial pressures. “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven,” Jassy told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

Jassy said the company had built up too many layers of management and bureaucracy over time. “You end up with a lot more people than you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,” he said.

Despite that, Jassy has repeatedly said Amazon’s corporate workforce is expected to shrink further as AI-driven efficiencies increase – companies across a range of industries are increasingly using AI to automate tasks such as coding and routine operations, helping to reduce costs.

Amazon itself has been placing growing emphasis on automation and artificial intelligence. Its AWS division showcased its latest AI models at its annual cloud computing conference in December.

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Unlike pandemic-era layoffs, which largely affected retail and warehouse staff, the upcoming job cuts are expected to focus on higher-paid corporate roles. Reports suggest the PXT division could see some of the deepest reductions, as AI tools increasingly take over administrative and human resources functions.

Layoffs are also expected to extend into AWS, Amazon’s main profit engine. While the division continues to invest heavily in genAI, data centres, and a flatter organisational structure, slower growth compared with some rivals has reportedly prompted cuts in legacy support and administrative roles.

The planned reductions come amid a broader wave of job cuts across the technology sector. In recent weeks, Meta began cutting more than 1,000 jobs from its Reality Labs division as it seeks to redirect resources away from virtual reality and metaverse products and towards AI-powered wearables and smartphone features.