Amazon to axe 14,000 global corporate jobs as spending on AI ramps up 

Amazon will cut 14,000 corporate jobs globally as the company looks to reduce costs and increase artificial intelligence (AI) usage.  

The cuts were announced to employees in an email from Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, who addressed allegations that the company is cutting jobs despite strong profit numbers.  

"Some may ask why we're reducing roles when the company is performing well," Galetti said. "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."  

Amazon employs over 75,000 people in the UK, working in a range of sectors from delivery drivers to high-level executives. The impact on UK employees is currently unclear, with employees expected to hear from line managers individually.  

Amazon’s gross profit for the second quarter of 2025 was over $86bn, a year-on-year increase of 17 per cent. Amazon will publish its third-quarter earnings later this week.   

“Amazon cutting 14,000 jobs while registering astronomical profits shows everything that’s wrong with the business,” wrote GMB, the union that represents Amazon employees in the UK, on X. “Bezos spends billions launching celebs into space, but he can’t treat his loyal workforce with dignity. We'll always stand with Amazon workers.”  

In Scotland, Amazon runs a major development centre in Edinburgh that focuses on devising, creating, and growing major features and websites for the company. In 2021 Amazon advertised for 100 new jobs in the centre, describing "the vast majority" of the roles being advertised as new tech and corporate positions.  

The cuts to overall workforce numbers are in line with CEO Andy Jassy’s vision for Amazon to operate as the “world’s largest startup”, utilising emerging technologies to compete in the AI market and beyond.   

“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,” said Jassy in a post outlining the company’s future strategy when he became CEO in 2021.  

Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million. The cuts announced today amount to about a four per cent reduction in its corporate workforce, with employees encouraged to apply for internal positions.  

Last week Amazon’s cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s most profitable division, faced major outages as servers crashed in the US-EAST-1 region, where a range of Amazon data centres are located.  The crash affected a range of businesses, leaving internet users logged out of essential services like banking apps and Ring security cameras.