Even as Revenues Grow, Amazon to Lay off 14,000. Why? AI & Corporate Efficiency. Walmart and Others Toot Similar Horn
by Wolf Richter • Oct 28, 2025 • 28 Comments
Revenue growth without employment growth? But Amazon spent $78 billion on capex in 2024 and more in 2025. So companies that get this cash hire more people than Amazon sheds?
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Amazon announced in a blog post that it would reduce its global corporate workforce by 14,000 roles, “reducing in some areas and hiring in others,” it said, “to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”
It will offer most affected employees “90 days to look for a new role internally (the timing will vary some based on local laws), and our recruiting teams will prioritize internal candidates to help as many people as possible find new roles within Amazon,” it said.
But the net reduction would be 14,000 roles, or roughly 0.9% of its global headcount of 1.556 million full- and part-time employees as of December 31 (not counting contractors), or about 4% of its global corporate workforce of about 350,000.
Amazon is a global company with a global workforce, and it did not specify how many of these to-be-eliminated corporate roles are in the US, but it may have made reference to other locations with the phrase, “the timing will vary some based on local laws.”
Why? AI & Corporate Efficiency – amid strong demand.AI:
“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 (in existing market segments and altogether new ones),” said the blog post, signed by Beth Galetti, Senior VP of People Experience and Technology.
Corporate efficiency: “We’re convicted [maybe AI-powered autocorrect hallucination for “convinced?”] that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
Amazon had been a hiring machine: It had gone in five years from 341,000 employees at the end of 2016 to 1.608 million employees at the end of 2021. Over the two years of 2020 and 2021 alone, it had added 810,000 employees, more than doubling its headcount in just two years! This type of all-out hiring not only by Amazon but lots of other big companies was in part responsible for the “labor shortages” in that sector.
Since then, Amazon has announced a series of global work force reductions to undo some of the over-hiring, and it has made an all-out push to use AI and automation across the company to do more with fewer employees. So the headcount dropped in 2022 and again in 2023. But in 2024, Amazon once again increased its headcount and ended the year at 1.556 million. By December 2025, the headcount may have dipped again.
Revenue growth without employment growth?
At the headcount peak in 2021, Amazon booked $470 billion in revenues. By 2024, with 52,000 fewer employees, revenues had soared by 36% to $638 billion. That is the result of the corporate drive for efficiency – including automation and AI.
Amazon, after the over-hiring binge, is doing more with fewer employees through process improvements, automation, and AI. It could continue the net headcount reduction even as revenues increase at a substantial clip.
Amazon has been throwing tens of billions of dollars at capital expenditures every year: In 2023, $48 billion; and in 2024, $78 billion. It expects capex in 2025 to be higher still. These investments went “primarily” into technology infrastructure (AWS data centers and the like) and “additional capacity to support our fulfillment network,” according to its 10-K filing.
These billions of dollars of capex are revenues for other companies, such as construction companies that build AI data centers, companies selling data center equipment, server makers, chipmakers, companies manufacturing the robotic equipment at Amazon’s fulfillment centers, software providers, etc. etc.
The hope is that these other companies will hire more people in the US with the Amazon cash than Amazon lays off in the US. The hope is that it would all work out, sort of (though a laid-off Amazon corporate worker may not be the best fit for a construction company).
In the past, technological innovation has led to continued employment growth, but many people who lost their jobs to technological innovation had a hard time finding equivalent new jobs that they could do.
But that theory that AI will increase overall employment, based on past observations about technological innovation, has yet to be proven.
Every company is different and makes different decisions. Over-hiring during the pandemic by portions of corporate America, especially tech, led to serial layoffs starting in late 2022, amid AI implementation and improved automation.
Walmart last month said it wants to freeze overall employment at about 2.1 million for three years, but get more efficient, thereby cut costs, while pushing up revenues by incorporating AI tools and agents into nearly all its roles, with its white-collar jobs the first to be affected. It committed to train its employees in using AI tools and agents, and those who cannot make the shift will be replaced. “It’s very clear that AI is going to change literally every job,” CEO Doug McMillon said in an interview with the WSJ in September.
Last year, Intuit made similar headlines when it said that it would lay off approximately 1,800 employees in non-AI related roles (over 1,000 of those due to performance), while planning to hire at least that many new folks for AI-related roles, with essentially no change in employment.
A word about the rumors-based headlines yesterday evening…
Amazon’s 14,000 reduction of roles globally, and not necessarily in the US, dispels the clickbait headlines yesterday evening, all based on a Reuters article citing anonymous sources, “Exclusive: Amazon targets as many as 30,000 corporate job cuts, sources say,” which generated a flood of similar stuff across the internet, such as: “Amazon may lay off 30,000 employees this week,” or “Amazon to cut 30,000 corporate jobs in largest layoffs since,” or the WSJ headline, “Amazon to Lay Off Up to 30,000 Corporate Workers,” which the WSJ tuned down this morning after Amazon released the blog post, to “Amazon Lays Off 14,000 Corporate Workers.” |
