Amazon has announced plans to eliminate 16,000 corporate roles, marking another major workforce reduction just months after a previously announced cut of 14,000 positions.

The move targets headquarters and corporate functions rather than the company’s much larger warehouse workforce.

A senior Amazon executive, Beth Galetti, said the company is reshaping its organization by reducing management layers, increasing ownership, and cutting bureaucracy.

Amazon said U.S.-based employees whose roles are impacted will generally receive a 90-day period to search for a new job inside the company, alongside severance and related support.

The reductions are expected to affect employees in the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica.

The announcement followed an internal communications slip: the planned cuts were inadvertently referenced in an email sent to employees and then quickly withdrawn, before Amazon formally confirmed the plan.

The scale of the reduction is significant in corporate terms.

Amazon’s total workforce was about 1.57 million at the end of September, with roughly 350,000 in corporate roles, and the 16,000 reduction represents about 4.6% of that corporate base.

The company has indicated it intends to redirect some of the savings toward higher spending on artificial intelligence initiatives.

Chief executive Andy Jassy has repeatedly linked Amazon’s restructuring to a broader effort to simplify decision-making and remove internal friction.

He has also previously warned that wider adoption of AI could reduce headcount in some roles over time, as tasks become more automated.

This new cut comes on top of earlier large reductions in recent years.

Amazon’s biggest post-pandemic trimming began in late 2022 and continued into early 2023, when roughly 27,000 roles were eliminated in multiple waves, as the company pulled back after rapid hiring during the pandemic-era surge.

The timing also intersects with Amazon’s competitive push in AI, especially in cloud services where companies are racing to build and sell AI computing and software at scale.

Amazon has been investing heavily in AI infrastructure and products, and internal cost reductions are one way large tech firms fund that spending while trying to preserve profitability.

Confirmed vs unclear: Amazon confirmed a plan to cut 16,000 corporate jobs after an earlier 14,000 reduction, and it said U.S. employees will generally have a 90-day internal job-search window; what’s still unclear is which specific teams and geographies will take the largest share of the cuts beyond the countries already named.

Amazon is scheduled to report its next quarterly results soon, covering the U.S. holiday season.

Public market forecasts for the quarter referenced in the provided material point to revenue above $211 billion and profit around $21 billion, and Amazon’s prior quarter results referenced there cited $180 billion in revenue and $21 billion in profit, figures investors will compare against the company’s AI spending and restructuring plans.

What to watch next:

- Which business units are named as the primary targets for the corporate reductions.

- Whether the 90-day internal placement process materially reduces the number of employees who ultimately exit.

- Any updates from Andy Jassy on management-layer reductions and how many layers Amazon aims to remove.

- The scale and timing of Amazon’s planned AI spending relative to cost savings from workforce cuts.

- Details in the next earnings release about corporate operating expenses, cloud growth, and guidance for the next quarter.

- Whether Amazon signals additional workforce actions tied explicitly to AI automation in 2026.