New York (AFP) – US online retail and cloud computing giant Amazon said Wednesday that it would be cutting 16,000 jobs worldwide as part of a restructuring, as it focuses spending on artificial intelligence. The job cuts, which follow already flagged plans to cut its workforce by 14,000 posts, are aimed at “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” senior vice president Beth Galetti said in a statement.
Media reports from October had said the roughly 30,000 job cuts planned in total would impact nearly 10 percent of the 350,000 office jobs at Amazon, without affecting the distribution and warehouse workers that make up the bulk of its 1.5 million employees. At the time, the company refused to comment on the reports, which said they came amid increased investments in artificial intelligence.
Amazon did not give any breakdown of the latest job cuts on Wednesday, saying only that “every team will continue to evaluate the ownership, speed, and capacity to invent for customers, and make adjustments as appropriate.” The company will release its full-year 2025 results on February 5. In its last quarterly earnings statement in October, the company said it spent $1.8 billion on severance costs tied to planned job cuts.
Amazon said that new positions will be offered to employees where possible, without giving further details on which divisions will be affected by the cuts. The layoffs are in line with a trend to trim white-collar management jobs across big tech. Microsoft in July said it had slashed a little less than four percent of its global workforce, about 15,000 jobs. Facebook owner Meta has also cut jobs over the past year, in a move intended to remove organizational bloat following aggressive hiring during the pandemic.
Dutch tech giant ASML on Wednesday said it would cut hundreds of management jobs to improve internal organization, with HP and Oracle also announcing recent layoffs. Like other tech giants, Amazon is making massive investments to grab a slice of the AI revolution pie. It is particularly banking on the performance of its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s leading cloud provider, which is engaged in a race against its fast-growing rivals, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
And spending on developing new AI-based chips and services is growing exponentially. In December, Amazon announced that it would invest more than $35 billion in India.
© 2024 AFP
