Amazon.com Inc. is reportedly planning to let go up to 30,000 employees in what would be its largest ever round of layoffs.

Some workers could be let go as early as Tuesday, as the company makes its latest in a series of moves aimed at cutting down costs and conserving cash. A report by Reuters cited anonymous sources familiar with the matter as saying that the job cuts would represent about 10% of Amazon’s global corporate workforce, though not all of them will happen this week.

However, it’s expected that thousands of notices will go out to employees this week. The layoffs are set to affect virtually every part of Amazon’s enormous organization, including its human resources department, cloud computing and advertising teams, and a number of other business units. The company hasn’t yet finalized the total number of reductions, according to one anonymous source.

The layoffs come at a time when many American companies are looking for ways to reduce their operating costs or at least slow their head count growth, due to rising prices, a tight labor market and the on-again, off-again prospect of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

In the case of Amazon, Chief Executive Andy Jassy (pictured) has been striving to cut costs for years, partly to compensate for the company’s massive investments in artificial intelligence, which requires the construction of enormous data centers. The online retail giant has laid off about 27,000 employees since 2022.

According to Reuters, Amazon views the cuts as part of an ongoing effort to correct its aggressive hiring during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. During that time, there was a significant boom in online shopping that resulted in Amazon doubling its warehouse network in less than two years, creating thousands of new blue- and white-collor positions.

Jassy has also been looking for ways to do more with less, notably by using artificial intelligence systems to automate work that was previously performed by humans. In June, he became one of the first high profile CEOs in the U.S. to admit that AI will likely eliminate the need for many jobs, and predicted that Amazon will replace humans in thousands of roles in the coming years. He called generative AI a “once-in-a-lifetime technological change” and noted that it’s already affecting the way it runs its business.

“​​As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” he said at the time. “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.”

Earlier this month, Amazon lifted the lid on a new, AI-powered robotic warehouse system called Blue Jay that’s able to automate tasks such as scanning and sorting packages. It’s believed that the system will allow the company to build smaller warehouses closer to consumers in urban areas, where it hasn’t been able to operate so far. In addition, the company is also experimenting with AI tools that can predict shopper’s needs and make recommendations for their next purchases.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Amazon is still trying to adjust its business following its all-out hiring spree during the height of the pandemic. He believes the company is trying to balance the layoffs with the roll out of new automated systems and processes powered by robotics and AI, so as to avoid too much disruption to its business. But doing so is challenging because there’s no real precedent for such maneuvering.

“These layoffs are different because it seems they’re going to be applied across all functions within Amazon, but on the flip side it suggests Andy Jassy believes that all parts of its business can be automated with new technologies,” Mueller said. “However, he needs to be careful to time the layoffs and the roll out of its process improvements, because he cannot allow dips in business performance. Amazon’s razor thin retail margins make the timing of the shift to machine decisions very tricky.”

Another problem Amazon has to contend with its the growing perception that it’s struggling in AI, with recent comments from analysts voicing concerns that it appears to be lagging behind competitors such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp. In July, Amazon reported a sharp increase in profit and sales for its second quarter, but its cloud computing business failed to match the growth of its rivals’ and its stock declined. At the time, AllianceBernstein LP analysts said in a note that the results posed “uncomfortable questions” for the company about whether it’s an “AI winner or a laggard.”

Despite this, Amazon has continued to throw billions of dollars at its AI investments. It reported $31.4 billion in capital expenditure during the second quarter, and explained that most of this was related to building out cloud computing infrastructure for AI. The company said at the time that the number was “representative” of its planned spending for the remainder of the year.

Amazon is expected to report its third-quarter financial results after the bell on Thursday, Oct. 30, when we’ll likely learn more about the planned layoffs.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE