Amazon's AI division faces job cuts as the company prioritises customer needs and efficiency gains #
Amazon layoffs have reached the team that builds the company's own frontier artificial intelligence models, with roles removed across its artificial general intelligence unit on Wednesday.
The round pushes the number of corporate posts cut since October past 30,000. Amazon would not put a figure on Wednesday's reduction, nor say which teams inside the unit absorbed it. Staff losing jobs in the United States keep pay and benefits for 90 days, with outplacement help, transitional health cover, and severance eligibility on top.
A company spokesperson said large model work remained among the most important things Amazon was doing, but that a tighter focus on customer priorities meant 'eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization.'
The spending tells a different story. Amazon is on course to lay out about $200B (£150B) in capital expenditure this year, most of it on the data centres, chips, and networking equipment that AI depends on. The cuts arrive eight days before second-quarter results on 30 July, the first full reading on that budget since chief executive Andy Jassy set it in February.
Jassy pointed staff in this direction more than a year ago. In a memo published on Amazon's newsroom in June 2025, he wrote that rolling out generative AI and agents would 'reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains.' He told employees to learn the tools and work in leaner teams.
Inside the Amazon Layoffs at the Nova Model Team #
The AGI unit is not chasing machine superintelligence, whatever its name suggests. Its output is Nova, the range of foundation models Amazon launched in 2024, and Nova Act, added since to let businesses assemble agents that handle multi-step jobs without supervision. A reshuffle in December also placed custom silicon and quantum computing under the same roof.
Senior departures have been steady. Rohit Prasad, who ran the AI organisation, left late last year, and the group now sits under senior vice president Peter DeSantis. David Luan, head of the AGI Lab and an arrival from Amazon's 2024 hire of the team behind his startup Adept, went in February.
That record shaped the reaction. On the anonymous workplace forum Blind, posts on Wednesday questioned why Amazon would cut from AGI at all, and asked whether the company was retreating from agents.
Spending elsewhere suggests otherwise. On 30 June, AWS put $1B (£750M) behind a Forward Deployed Engineering unit that places its own engineers inside client organisations to get agentic systems into production, financed from Amazon's balance sheet rather than with outside partners.
Why Amazon Layoffs Keep Coming as AI Spending Climbs #
Capital expenditure reached $131.8B (£98.9B) in 2025, against $83B (£62.3B) the year before. February's guidance of roughly $200B (£150B) landed well clear of the $146.6B (£110B) analysts had pencilled in, and Jassy defended it by telling them Amazon was 'monetizing capacity as fast as we can install it.'
Revenue has followed. AWS turned over $37.59B (£28.2B) in the first quarter, up 28% on the year and its quickest growth in 15 quarters.
There is a buy-as-well-as-build strand to the strategy. Amazon has now committed up to $33B (£24.8B) to Anthropic, taking in $5B (£3.8B) pledged in April and up to $20B (£15B) more tied to commercial milestones, on top of $8B (£6B) already invested. Bedrock runs Anthropic's Claude for more than 100,000 AWS customers, making an outside lab's models one of the most used families on Amazon's own platform.
Investors marked the day down. The shares closed at $244.85 (£183.64), off about 1.1% and lower for a second session, having gained roughly 9% for the year as of 20 July.
The sector picture is similar. Tracker Layoffs.fyi counted around 120,000 technology roles removed worldwide in 2026 by early July, with AI cited repeatedly as the reason while capital budgets hit records. Amazon did not say whether any UK posts were affected. It employs about 75,000 permanent staff across more than 100 British sites.
Second-quarter results are due at 10:00 p.m. BST on 30 July.
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