Amazon is preparing to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs, marking the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history, as new reports suggest it is simultaneously accelerating efforts to replace hundreds of thousands of warehouse positions with robots.
Amazon will begin notifying employees of layoffs on Tuesday, with cuts spanning nearly every business division, CNBC reported. The move comes as part of what Chief Executive Andy Jassy reportedly indicated was a broader cost-cutting campaign that began during the pandemic.
Internal company documents reviewed by The New York Times reportedly show Amazon plans to automate 75% of its operations and replace more than half a million human roles with robotic systems. Executives told Amazon’s board last year they believed automation could allow the company to avoid hiring roughly 160,000 additional U.S. workers by 2027.
“Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too,” said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, warning that one of America’s largest private employers could soon become “a net job destroyer, not a net job creator,” per The NYT.
Amazon said in a statement that the documents cited by The NYT were incomplete and did not represent the company’s overall hiring strategy. The company has maintained that automation will create new technician and engineering roles even as it reduces its need for traditional warehouse labor.
The layoffs and automation drive come as lawmakers raise new questions about Amazon’s continued reliance on the H-1B visa program, which allows companies to hire foreign “skilled” workers.
The privately operated H-1B salary database indicates Amazon and its subsidiaries have filed Labor Condition Applications—an initial step in obtaining visa approvals—for positions ranging from warehouse workers to senior software engineers, with start dates running into December.
The Department of Labor, which processes such applications, has not updated its data in weeks due to the ongoing government shutdown. As a result, it remains unclear whether Amazon has continued to apply for new visas this fall.
Over the past five years, Amazon has been approved for more than 40,000 H-1B visas, making it the single largest user of the program in the United States, according to the USCIS H-1B data hub.
In a letter to Jassy dated September 24, 2025, Senators Charles Grassley and Richard Durbin criticized the company for seeking foreign labor while laying off tens of thousands of American employees. “With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that Amazon cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions,” the senators wrote. They asked Jassy to provide detailed data on the company’s visa hiring practices, wage levels, and recruitment methods, The Dallas Express reported.
Concurrently, the Trump administration opened a federal public comment period on a proposed policy to weight the H-1B visa allotment process to favor beneficiaries with the highest salaries, an apparent attempt to address criticism of the program as a job killer for Americans.
However, an Amazon spokesperson, Kelly Nantel, hit back at the notion that the company was eliminating Americans’ jobs. “The facts speak for themselves: No company has created more jobs in America over the past decade than Amazon. We’re actively hiring at operations facilities across the country and recently announced plans to fill 250,000 positions for the holiday season,” in a media statement shared with The Dallas Express.
The new round of layoffs adds to the roughly 27,000 jobs Amazon has already cut since 2022. The company reportedly has about 350,000 corporate employees worldwide, with a total global workforce exceeding 1.5 million, per CNBC.
Jassy told staff earlier this year that Amazon’s embrace of generative artificial intelligence could further shrink its workforce, saying the company “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
As Amazon moves to automate its facilities, communities across the United States may soon face job losses that mirror the transformation already underway in places like Shreveport, Louisiana, where Amazon’s newest warehouse employs a quarter fewer workers than it would have without robotics.