An American giant with companies in Romania announced on Tuesday that it will lay off 14,000 employees as part of a broad cost-cutting and internal reorganization plan, while the company accelerates investments in generative artificial intelligence.
An American giant with three companies in Romania announced on Tuesday that it will lay off 14,000 employees
In a blog post, the company wrote that these layoffs are being made to help make the company more efficient and less bureaucratic as it seeks to invest in “our biggest bets”including generative artificial intelligence.
“This generation of artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing and entirely new market segments),” wrote Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon. “Swe believe we need to be organized more efficiently, with fewer layers and more accountability, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and our businesses.”
The layoffs are expected to ultimately be the largest job cuts in Amazon's history, CNBC previously reported. The cuts could affect up to 30,000 employees, according to Reuters, which cited sources familiar with the situation.
Employees in Amazon's cloud, food, video games, human resources, sustainability and communications, advertising and devices divisions were told of the cuts early Tuesday morning, though layoffs are expected to affect nearly every area of the company.
Amazon is the nation's second-largest private employer, with more than 1.54 million employees globally at the end of the second quarter. This figure is mainly represented by the warehouse workforce.
It has about 350,000 employees in corporate and technology companies, which means that the 14,000 available jobs represent about 4% of this segment of its workforce.
The company has indicated that it will continue to lay off employees over the next year, even as it plans to continue hiring in “key strategic areas.”
Amazon's job cuts come as companies in industries such as technology, banking, automotive and retail have pointed to the rise of generative artificial intelligence as a force that is likely to change or is already changing the size of their workforces.
Several companies have indicated that they can hire fewer employees and still increase revenue, in part as a result of relying more on artificial intelligence, which they believe will translate into greater efficiency and productivity.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in June that the company's workforce would shrink even more as a result of its adoption of generative artificial intelligence, telling employees that “will need fewer people to do some of the jobs that are done today and more people to do other types of jobs“.
Jassy, who took over Amazon from Jeff Bezos in 2021, has waged a cost-cutting campaign within the company in recent years. Amazon laid off 27,000 jobs between 2022 and 2023, and job cuts have continued since then, albeit on a smaller scale.
He hired too much
Amazon is cutting staff after going through a series of layoffs during the Covid-19 pandemic, in part to meet growing demand for e-commerce and cloud computing services.
Since then, the company has taken steps to shut down some of its unprofitable initiatives, while pledging to invest about $118 billion this year in artificial intelligence development and cloud infrastructure. Amazon is facing increasing pressure to demonstrate that its cloud and artificial intelligence businesses are not lagging behind rivals.
At the same time, Jassy is trying to overhaul Amazon's corporate culture and operate as “the biggest startup in the world”in an attempt to remain competitive. Last September, as part of a mandate requiring corporate employees to work in the office five days a week, it set a goal of flattening organizations within Amazon by the first quarter of this year.
Earlier this month, Amazon announced plans to hire 250,000 full-time, part-time and temporary workers in its order processing and shipping facilities to meet demand for the holiday shopping season.
Companies from Romania
The American tech giant Amazon has been present in Romania for almost 20 years and has thousands of employees in Iași, Bucharest and Timișoara, and according to its official website it is still looking for staff in our country.
Amazon Development Center SRL is the largest company among the four opened in Romania. In 2024, the company had an average number of 3,424 employees, according to data from the Ministry of Finance. The company made total revenues of 816.9 million lei, but came out with losses of 29.5 million lei.
In Romania, Amazon still has the following companies open:
- Amazon MLS Romania SRL (Bucharest) – 402 employees (2024), total revenues of 80 million lei, profit of 8.7 million lei;
- Amazon Data Services SRL (Iași) officially has zero employees in 2024, but recorded total revenues of 9 million lei and profit of 766,753 lei;
- Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, branch of an Amazon subsidiary in Luxembourg. The company from Romania, based in Bucharest, had 1 employees in 2024, made total revenues of 171 million lei and had a profit of 460,795 lei.
The American giant, which generated many jobs in the past, is now directing its investments towards full automation and gradually reducing human involvement in logistics activities, reports Union Rayo.
Amazon already has a million robots active in its distribution centers — from robotic arms to autonomous carriers — and the pace of replacing human employees shows no signs of slowing. Although the decision is justified by increasing productivity and reducing costs, thousands of people are losing their jobs without real alternatives.
Robots have been introduced to Amazon warehouses since 2020, and since then their number has increased fivefold.
Although Amazon says it has trained 700,000 employees since 2019, the company has laid off more than 27,000 people since 2022, including in retail and devices.
