Amazon on Wednesday commenced the latest wave of job cuts in its corporate workforce in what’s poised to be the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history.
Employees were notified of the cuts in emails sent by Doug Herrington, the company’s worldwide retail chief, and human resources head Beth Galetti, CNBC confirmed. Amazon said earlier this month that it will cut more than 18,000 jobs.
Amazon’s human resources and stores divisions are likely to be among the organizations most severely impacted by the job cuts. The company expects to notify all affected employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica by the end of the day, Galetti and Herrington said in their memos.
Employees in other regions may be informed later. In China, for example, the company will notify staffers after the Lunar New Year.
The layoffs come after a period of rapid head count growth at Amazon during the Covid-19 pandemic. In November, CEO Andy Jassy said the company would begin eliminating roles, primarily in its devices and recruiting organizations.
Jassy is also undergoing a broad review of Amazon’s expenses as the company reckons with an economic downturn and slowing growth in its core retail business. Amazon froze hiring in its corporate workforce, axed some experimental projects and slowed warehouse expansion.
WW Stores Team,
I want to send a note that today we will be notifying employees impacted by our decision to reduce our Amazon WW stores corporate headcount. Notification emails will be sent out to impacted employees shortly, and we expect all notifications in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica to be completed by end of the day today. In other regions, we are following legal processes, which may include time for a consultation with employee representative bodies starting as soon as today and possibly resulting in longer timelines to communicate with impacted employees. And in China, we will notify employees after the Chinese New Year.
While it will be painful to say goodbye to many of our talented colleagues, it is an important part of a wider effort to lower our cost to serve so we can continue investing in the wide selection, low prices, and fast shipping that our customers love. During Covid, our first priority was scaling to meet the needs of our customers while ensuring the safety of our employees. I’m incredibly proud of this team’s work during this period. Although other companies might have balked at the short-term economics, we prioritized investing for customers and employees during these unprecedented times.
The exit out of Covid this past year was challenging, with labor shortages, supply chain difficulties, inflation, and productivity overhang from growing our fulfillment and transportation networks so substantially during the pandemic, all of which increased our cost to serve. As we head into 2023, we remain in uncertain economic times. Therefore, we’ve determined that we need to take further steps to improve our cost structure so we can keep investing in the customer experience that attracts customers to Amazon and grows our business.
Our plan to improve our cost structure will unfortunately include role reductions. It is painful and rare for us to take this step, and I know how difficult this is on the individuals impacted and their loved ones. Our goal is to make sure every impacted employee is assisted in this transition, so for example, in the U.S., we are providing packages that include a 60-day non-working transitional period with full pay and benefits, plus an additional several weeks of severance depending on the length of time with the company, a separation payment, transitional benefits, and external job placement support. I would like to personally thank each and everyone of you affected by the plan changes for your contributions to our customers and your broader team.
Role reductions are one of several steps we are taking to lower our cost to serve. We are also increasing local in-stock of the most popular times, making it easier for customers to consolidate shipments for multiple items, and increasing the ways customers can buy the low-priced everyday essentials they need to keep their households running, all with the aim of reducing our network and delivery costs. And by improving our cost structure, we are also able to continue investing meaningfully in big growth areas such as grocery, Amazon Business, Buy with Prime, and healthcare.
To those who are staying, I know this is a difficult time for you, as well, and it’s important we support one another. We are saying goodbye to people we’ve worked closely with, and there is plenty of hard work ahead as your innovate on behalf of customers. Although I would prefer not to eliminate even a single role, we are making these changes now to keep investing in improving the customer experience, which will strengthen our business for the long term.
As I’ve shared with many of you, I have never been more optimistic about the opportunity in front of us. For over 25 years, we’ve innovated on behalf of customers, and in so many ways, we are just getting started. Lowering our cost to serve will be a core priority for us in the years ahead to fund even more innovation. It’s not just about doing more with less, but rethinking how we serve our customers, how we organize internally, and what new areas of innovation we invest in. Every team has a role to play in finding ways to reduce costs while improving selection, pricing, and delivery speeds. I am confident that Amazonians will bring their ownership, innovation, and bias for action to this challenge, unlocking even more value for customers.
Doug
All,
Today we took the difficult step of reducing roles across Amazon. While several teams are impacted, the majority of role eliminations are in our WW Amazon Stores business and our People Experience & Technology (PXT) organization.
Conversations with impacted employees took place around the world today, and this morning, Pacific Time, notification messages were sent to all impacted employees in the U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica. We are providing impacted employees with a number of resources, and PXT leaders will host country-specific information sessions for the U.S. and Canada today while leaders are setting up meetings with each affected team member. In other regions, we are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representative bodies and possibly result in longer timelines to communicate with impacted employees. In China, we will notify employees after the Chinese New Year.
Our priority in the coming days is supporting those who are affected. To help with the transition, we are providing packages that include a separation payment, transitional benefits as applicable by country, and external job placement support.
Please continue to show the support and care that I so often witness here at Amazon. This is a very difficult time, so we encourage you to reach out to My HR with questions and remember that our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is available 24/7 for free and confidential help.
For a third time since taking office in January, President Donald Trumpplans toextend a deadline that would require China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business.
“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.
ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark.
Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.
Prior to Trump signing the first executive order, TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. for a day, only to return after the president’s announcement. Apple and Google also removed TikTok from the Apple App Store and Google Play during TikTok’s initial U.S. shut down, but then reinstated the app to their respective app stores in February.
Multiple parties including Oracle, AppLovin, and Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium have expressed interest in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. It’s unclear whether the Chinese government would approve a deal.
— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report
Amazon Web Services is set to announce an update to its Graviton4 chip that includes 600 gigabytes per second of network bandwidth, what the company calls the highest offering in the public cloud.
Ali Saidi, a distinguished engineer at AWS, likened the speed to a machine reading 100 music CDs a second.
Graviton4, a central processing unit, or CPU, is one of many chip products that come from Amazon’s Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas. The chip is a win for the company’s custom strategy and putting it up against traditional semiconductor players like Intel and AMD.
At AWS’s re:Invent 2024 conference last December, the company announced Project Rainier – an AI supercomputer built for startup Anthropic. AWS has put $8 billion into backing Anthropic.
AWS Senior Director for Customer and Project Engineering Gadi Hutt said Amazon is looking to reduce AI training costs and provide an alternative to Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs.
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model is trained on Trainium2 GPUs, according to AWS, and Project Rainier is powered by over half a million of the chips – an order that would have traditionally gone to Nvidia.
Read more CNBC tech news
Hutt said that while Nvidia’s Blackwell is a higher-performing chip than Trainium2, the AWS chip offers better cost performance.
“Trainium3 is coming up this year, and it’s doubling the performance of Trainium2, and it’s going to save energy by an additional 50%,” he said.
The demand for these chips is already outpacing supply, according to Rami Sinno, director of engineering at AWS’ Annapurna Labs.
“Our supply is very, very large, but every single service that we build has a customer attached to it,” he said.
With Graviton4’s upgrade on the horizon and Project Rainier’s Trainium chips, Amazon is demonstrating its broader ambition to control the entire AI infrastructure stack, from networking to training to inference.
And as more major AI models like Claude 4 prove they can train successfully on non-Nvidia hardware, the question isn’t whether AWS can compete with the chip giant — it’s how much market share it can take.
The release schedule for the Graviton4 update will be provided by the end of June, according to an AWS spokesperson.
The U.S. banking giant told CNBC on Tuesday that it’s planning to launch a so-called deposit token on Coinbase’s public blockchain Base, which is built on top of the Ethereum network. Each deposit token is meant to serve as a digital representation of a commercial bank deposit.
JPMD will offer clients round-the-clock settlement as well as the ability to pay interest to holders. It is a so-called “permissioned token,” meaning it is only available to JPMorgan’s institutional clients — unlike many stablecoins, which are publicly available.
“We see institutions using JPMD for onchain digital asset settlement solutions as well as for making cross-border business-to-business transactions,” Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, J.P. Morgan’s blockchain unit, told CNBC Tuesday.
“Given the fact that deposit tokens would eventually be interest bearing as well, this would provide better fungibility with existing deposit products that institutions currently use,” he added.
Deposit token vs. stablecoin
JPMorgan said the benefit of launching a deposit token over a stablecoin is that it gives institutional clients a way to move money around faster and easier while still having a close connection with traditional banking systems.
A stablecoin is a type of digital token that’s designed to be pegged 1:1 to the value of a fiat currency at all times. The most popular stablecoins are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. The entire stablecoin market is worth approximately $262 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.
In the U.S., stablecoins remain broadly unregulated — although this is likely to change soon. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on the GENIUS Act, legislation that would introduce formal regulation for such tokens.
Elsewhere, the European Union regulates stablecoins under its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, while the U.K. has also laid out plans to regulate the crypto industry. Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority is currently consulting on proposals to require stablecoin issuers to ensure their tokens maintain their value against a given asset.
Read more CNBC tech news
JPMorgan’s digital asset chief told CNBC that the bank chose Coinbase as its blockchain partner since the crypto exchange is already a long-standing client and a leader in the crypto space.
JPMD has had “preliminary interest from large institutional players who want more native onchain cash solutions from pre-eminent and reputed financial institutions,” Mallela added.
Speculation had been building around JPMorgan’s new crypto offering after a trademark application filed by the bank for “JPMD” was made public Monday.
The trademark outlined a broad range of crypto services under the JPMD name, including trading, exchange, transfer and payment services for digital assets.
Various crypto media outlets had speculated whether the bank was about to launch its own stablecoin. However, JPMorgan says that, while its token may share some similarities with a stablecoin, it’s ultimately a different kind of product.