Update: Amazon has confirmed plans to make approximately 14,000 people redundant within its corporate workforce, including staff within its video game division.
Beth Galetti, SVP of people experience and technology at Amazon, confirmed the news in a message to employees (later posted on the Amazon website).
She explained the tech, media, and retail colossus is making cuts with the aim of operating like the “world’s largest startup” and eliminating bureaucracy.
“The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work 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,” she wrote.
“We’re working hard to support everyone whose role is impacted, including offering most 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.”
Galetti also espoused the benefits of AI in her message to employees, and claimed the oft-criticized technology is already allowing companies like Amazon to “innovate much faster than ever before.” She suggested it’s important for the company to reduce its headcount in order to take advantage of the perceived opportunity presented by the tech.
“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well. Across our businesses, we’re delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results,” she continued.
“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. 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). We’re 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.”
It’s currently unclear which video game studios—and how many game workers, specifically—have been impacted, but individual testimonies shared online indicate the division has been targeted by Amazon.
Original story: Amazon intends to cut thousands of corporate roles across key departments such as logistics, payments, cloud computing, and games.
That’s according to reports from both Bloomberg and Reuters, which claim the layoffs could be announced this week and impact up to 30,000 people.
Sources familiar with the situation told Reuters that Amazon will jettison swathes of workers to compensate for overhiring during the COVID-19 pandemic. The total number of redundancies will impact around 10 percent of the company’s 350,000 person corporate workforce. Amazon currently has around 1.55 million employees globally.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who was appointed in November 2021 and has worked at the company for decades, previously told staff that generative AI tools and agents will be used to replace human workers in the coming years.
In a memo to employees published in June 2025 (thanks again, Reuters), Jassy said the technology will change how Amazon works—resulting in the need for “fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” he added in the memo.
Amazon declined to comment when approached by Bloomberg and Reuters.
