US e-commerce and cloud company Amazon, fresh off a record $716.9 billion in revenue last year, has accounted for more than half of global tech job cuts so far this year.
The company announced 16,000 layoffs last month, following 14,000 cuts in October, according to data compiled by RationalFX from US WARN notices, TechCrunch, TrueUp, and Layoffs.fyi.
The cuts last month pushed global tech layoffs past 30,700 in less than two months, implying more than 52 per cent of all reductions were attributable to one company: Amazon. Its earlier round of layoffs made Amazon the second-largest contributor to global tech layoffs last year, with a total of 19,555, just behind Nvidia’s massive 33,900 job cuts.
The layoffs come even as Amazon reported record revenues last year of $716.9 billion, up 12 per cent from the prior year. This implies the moves are driven by operational restructuring rather than financial duress. Separately, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post also cut jobs this year, laying off roughly one‑third of its workforce, including more than 300 journalists, in a broad restructuring that closed most of its foreign bureaux.
Other tech companies around the world are also implementing restructuring of their workforce. European semiconductor and lighting group ams Osram announced about 2,000 layoffs despite narrowing losses, while Meta, ASML, Block, Autodesk, Salesforce, Ocado, and Pinterest have cut between 675 and 1,900 jobs as part of strategic pivots toward artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
The layoffs also follow higher rates of AI adoption across the tech companies. Last year, about 28.5 per cent of global tech job cuts were tied to automation, and early this year has already seen at least 1,430 AI-related job cuts, including Pinterest’s 15 per cent workforce reduction. Most layoffs target corporate, product, and support-layer roles.
“Large-scale layoffs, once a red flag for investors, have become a standard tool for operational refinement among leading tech firms,” Alan Cohen, analyst at RationalFX, said. “Amazon’s cuts illustrate a shift toward AI-augmented, leaner operations, even amid record revenue growth.”
