Amazon plans to launch a new round of layoffs affecting up to 30,000 employees, involving the logistics, payments, gaming, and cloud computing departments

According to information obtained by Zhitong Finance APP, multiple informed sources revealed that Amazon (AMZN.US) plans to initiate a new round of corporate job cuts in several key departments, including logistics, payments, video games, and cloud computing (AWS). Media reports on Monday indicated that this round of layoffs could affect up to 30,000 employees, with announcements expected as early as Tuesday. This will mark the largest round of workforce reduction since over 27,000 white-collar employees were laid off cumulatively from the end of 2022 to early 2023. At that time, the company's CEO Andy Jassy initiated a "rolling" layoff strategy to address the rapid expansion and high costs incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, although Amazon has continued to make small-scale optimizations to individual teams, such intensive actions have not been seen again. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment. Jassy warned as early as June this year that as artificial intelligence is widely used to take over tasks previously performed by humans, the total number of corporate employees at Amazon "may shrink." This statement once caused panic among employees, with various anonymous forums filled with discussions among internal staff trying to probe into the layoff plans. In a memo to employees at that time, Jassy stated, "In the future, we will need fewer people to do some of today's work, while we will need more people to do other new work... It is difficult to accurately calculate the net effect in the short term, but in the coming years, as AI brings efficiency improvements, we expect the overall number of corporate employees to decrease." According to informed sources, Jassy has repeatedly emphasized in internal planning meetings that functions that can be replaced by AI should be further automated, and he believes that some business segments of the company remain bloated after being "scaled up" during the pandemic, with the layoffs of the past three years not fully digesting structural redundancies. Earlier this year, Amazon also required some corporate employees to relocate to offices closer to their direct supervisors or teams, including locations in Seattle, Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., forcing some employees to move across state lines. As of June 30, Amazon had approximately 1.55 million employees worldwide, the vast majority of whom were warehouse and frontline workers; corporate white-collar employees numbered about 350,000