Amazon cuts 14K corporate jobs, ramps up AI spending

In June CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively sought to cut costs, said that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the next few years.

Amazon will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs as the online retail giant ramps up spending on artificial intelligence while trimming spending.

In June CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively sought to cut costs since becoming CEO in 2021, said that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the next few years.

Jassy said at the time that Amazon had more than 1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built, but that figure was a “small fraction” of what it plans to build.

Jassy encouraged employees to get on board with the company’s AI plans. Earlier that month Amazon announced that it was planning to invest US$10 billion toward building a campus in North Carolina to expand its cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Since 2024 started, Amazon has committed to about $10 billion apiece to data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina as it ramps up its infrastructure to compete with other tech giants to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence products.

Amazon is competing in the AI space with giants like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. In a conference call with industry analysts in May, Jassy said the potential for growth in the company’s AWS business is massive.

“If you believe your mission is to make customers’ lives easier and better every day, and you believe that every customer experience will be reinvented with AI, you’re going to invest very aggressively in AI, and that’s what we’re doing. You can see that in the 1,000-plus AI applications we’re building across Amazon. You can see that with our next generation of Alexa, named Alexa+,” he said.

On Tuesday, the online giant said it was reducing bureaucracy.