- Amazon is cutting fewer than 1,000 corporate jobs, with the latest layoffs concentrated mainly in its Stores business across the US, India and the UK.
Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has eliminated fewer than 1,000 white-collar positions in a fresh round of layoffs affecting its Stores business, according to Reuters’ report. Employees in the US, India and the UK are among those affected.
The latest Amazon layoffs primarily involve the company’s Stores division, which oversees its core e-commerce operations. Reports indicate that affected functions include customer service, selling partner and marketplace support, and retail engineering, although Amazon has not provided a full breakdown of the roles eliminated.
The cuts were reported as Amazon was holding its Prime Big Deal Days shopping event, which began October 6. Amazon confirmed that it had made changes to parts of its Stores organization but did not publicly disclose a specific number of layoffs. The company said the revised structure is intended to better support its current priorities.
Which Amazon Departments Are Being Cut?
The latest reductions appear concentrated in Amazon’s retail organization rather than representing another companywide workforce reduction of the scale seen earlier this year. Internal employee discussions indicate that workers in customer service, marketplace support, and engineering-related positions were among those affected.
Amazon has already gone through several major restructuring rounds. In October 2025, the company announced broader organizational changes, saying it wanted to reduce management layers, increase ownership and reduce bureaucracy. Amazon later said in January 2026 that an additional approximately 16,000 roles would be affected by organizational changes. Amazon’s January workforce update said the reductions were part of work that had begun the previous year.
The latest cuts are considerably smaller than those earlier reductions. Amazon's workforce stood at approximately 1.595 million full-time and part-time employees at the end of the second quarter, according to its latest quarterly results. That figure excludes contractors and temporary personnel.
The company has also continued hiring and expanding parts of its operations. In September, Amazon announced higher minimum starting pay for US full-time core operations employees and said it was investing more than $1.5 billion in higher pay for those workers.
Amazon Cuts Jobs While Increasing AI Spending
The timing of the layoffs has renewed attention on Amazon’s broader effort to redirect resources toward artificial intelligence, although the company has not said that AI caused the latest Stores reductions. Amazon is committing enormous amounts of capital to infrastructure. The company expects approximately $220 billion in capital expenditures during 2026, with much of the increase tied to data centers, chips, and other infrastructure supporting AI and cloud computing.
The investment is already showing up in Amazon’s financial results. AWS revenue increased 37% year over year to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, while operating income from the cloud division reached $16.6 billion. Amazon said its AI business had exceeded a $25 billion annualized revenue run rate.
The company's growing AI exposure has also made Amazon one of the major AI infrastructure stocks investors are watching alongside other major technology companies.
At the same time, the spending comes with a significant cash requirement. Amazon reported a $7.6 billion free cash flow outflow for the 12 months ended June 30, compared with positive free cash flow a year earlier. The company attributed much of the change to increased purchases of property and equipment, primarily reflecting investments in AI.
Amazon’s broader AI infrastructure spending is part of a much larger technology investment cycle involving the biggest US cloud providers. The latest workforce reduction therefore comes against a mixed backdrop: Amazon is cutting some corporate positions while continuing to expand spending and staffing in areas tied to its long-term growth priorities.
The company has not announced another broad workforce reduction beyond the latest Stores-related changes. For now, the confirmed cuts remain focused on fewer than 1,000 corporate roles, primarily within the retail organization.