The Amazon headquarters sits virtually empty on March 10, 2020 in downtown Seattle, Washington. In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Amazon recommended all employees in its Seattle office to work from home, leaving much of downtown nearly void of people.
John Moore | Getty Images
Amazon’s 18,000-plus job cuts announced this month are being felt broadly across the company’s sprawling operations, from physical retail technology and grocery stores to robotics and drone delivery, and even in cloud computing.
That’s according to a spreadsheet created after the layoff announcement by an employee, who has encouraged those affected to submit their information for use by recruiters. The database, which was circulated widely on LinkedIn, provides a window into the businesses hit with layoffs.
CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a blog post in early January that “several teams” were impacted but that thecuts would primarily be centered in Amazon’s worldwide stores and human resources divisions. Beyond that, the company provided scant details on where downsizing would take place.
An Amazon spokesperson pointed CNBC to Jassy’s blog post on the layoffs.
Subsequent filings with state agencies offered a glimpse into the geographical dispersal of the layoffs. In Amazon’s home state of Washington, at least 2,300 employees lost their jobs, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings. Over 500 took place in California, including in engineering and recruiting divisions, while roughly 300 were in New York, filings show.
When Amazon reports fourth-quarter results on Thursday, executives are likely to face questions regarding the headcount reductions and the expected financial impact. Revenue growth is expected to sink to 6% and remain in single digits until the final period of 2023, according to analyst estimates, as Amazon reckons with the threats of a recession and a decline in consumer spending.
Amazon shares lost half their value in 2022, the worst year for shareholders since the dot-com crash in 2000.
The latest wave of layoffs, which is poised to be largest round of cuts in Amazon’s history, follow more than a decade of unbridled growth and massive expansion in the company’s network of fulfillment centers. Jassy blamed the need for cuts on “labor shortages, supply chain difficulties, inflation, and productivity overhang from growing our fulfillment and transportation networks so substantially during the pandemic.”
Here’s a breakdown of where job cuts took place. CNBC verified that the staffers listed as Amazon employees worked for the company.
Grocery and Physical stores
Employees working on various retail technologies, including Amazon’s cashierless checkout software called Just Walk Out, its palm-based payment service and Dash smart carts were part of the layoffs. The unit was recently moved to Amazon’s cloud-computing division after previously being housed under its retail organization.
There were cuts in the Fresh stores and online grocery delivery businesses for people employed as program managers, store designers, supply chain managers and software engineers.
Amazon Go and Go Grocery cashierless convenience stores and supermarkets were also hit with layoffs.
Zappos
Online shoe seller Zappos joined Amazon via acquisition in 2009. Employees with titles including program manager, software engineer and product buyer were among those laid off.
Amazon Robotics
Amazon Robotics is the company’s unit focused on automating aspects of its warehouse operations. The division evolved out of Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva Systems, a manufacturer of warehouse robots, for $775 million in 2012.
Hardware development engineers, mechatronics engineers, network engineers, applied science managers, and technical product managers were part of the job cuts.
Amazon Web Services
AWS pioneered the market for cloud infrastructure, allowing businesses to offload their servers and storage needs and pay by subscription and usage. The division now generates $80 billion in annual revenue and substantially all of the company’s profits.
Among those who lost their jobs had titles of software development engineer, senior program manager, account representative, cloud architect and quality assurance engineer.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in an interview late last year at the company’s annual Reinvent customer conference that “we do see some customers who are doing some belt-tightening now.”
Operations
Amazon’s operations division serves as a catchall for many far-reaching units inside the company. The organization oversees Amazon’s sprawling fulfillment and delivery businesses, among other things.
Employees involved in fulfillment center expansion, warehouse IT management, package pickup and returns, delivery routing software, environmental health and safety, workplace health and safety, and shipping and delivery service Amazon Logistics were among those involved in the cuts.
Payments
The company’s payments organization, which oversees units like online payments processing service Amazon Pay, was also hit with layoffs. Engineers, product managers and staffers working on the company’s Venmo checkout integration were among those laid off.
Health care
The cuts included employees working on Amazon’s various health-care offerings. Amazon Pharmacy, the online pharmacy it launched in 2020, saw program managers, risk compliance managers and billing managers let go as part of the job cuts. Additionally, employees working on digital health tools and the Halo health and fitness tracker lost their jobs.
Amazon has faced numerous challenges in its effort to crack the heal;th-care market. The company said last year that it was winding down its telehealth service, and the two founders of online pharmacy PillPack, which Amazon bought in 2018, announced their departures. Hundreds of employees were let go in 2022 between a division called Amazon Care and Care Medical, an independent company that was contracted to work with Amazon.
Marketplace
Employees in Amazon’s third-party marketplace unit were among those whose jobs were cut. The business oversees the millions of sellers who hawk their wares on the website and app.
Staffers involved in third-party seller services, seller experience, seller financial technology, software development, and online seller communities were let go. Amazon Launchpad, a unit that assists new sellers, also experienced heavy cuts.
Real estate
Employees involved in construction and facilities planning, real estate transactions, disaster recovery, and physical stores development lost their jobs.
Retail
Retail units that were affected include supply chain optimization technology, pricing, vendor management, the Amazon Shopping app and Amazon’s business-to-business marketplace. The cuts also included fashion stylists, who provided clothing recommendations to Amazon shoppers as part of its “try before you buy” service, formerly known as Prime Wardrobe.
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 15, 2025.
Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty Images
Palantir expanded its lawsuit against two former employees on Thursday to include the CEO of their new artificial intelligence startup, Percepta AI.
In the suit, Palantir alleged that Percepta CEO and co-founder Hirsh Jain, co-founder Radha Jain, and a third employee, Joanna Cohen, violated their non-solicitation agreements, hiring top talent to create a competitive business.
Palantir and Percepta didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The three defendants are accused of attempting to “poach” executives and developers from their former company and “plunder Palantir’s valuable intellectual property.”
Cohen and Radha Jain, who were named in the original lawsuit filed in October, were previously senior engineers at Palantir. Hirsh Jain, an executive responsible for the company’s healthcare portfolio, was added as another defendant in the latest complaint.
Palantir said the defendants were “entrusted” with the company’s “crown jewels,” including source code, customer workflows and proprietary customer engagement strategies.
The former employees “brazenly disregarded their contractual and legal commitments to Palantir and instead chose a path of deception and unjust competition,” the plaintiffs said in the document, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Cohen and Radha Jain denied the initial allegations in a November filing, and agreed to stop working for Percepta during the proceedings.
The suit accused Hirsh Jain, who resigned from Palantir in August 2024, of an “aggressive campaign” to recruit other employees to join Percepta, and said the startup has already hired at least 10 former Palantir employees.
An alleged message written by Hirsh Jain in November 2024 read, “I’m down to pillage the best devs at palantir when they’re at their maximum richness.”
The complaint says Rhada Jain wrote another message saying, “God thinking about poaching is so fun.”
Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, builds analytics software for companies and government agencies, including the U.S. military. The company’s stock price has soared more than tenfold since the end of 2023, lifting its market cap close to $450 billion.
Palantir also accused Cohen of sending herself highly confidential documents shortly after announcing her resignation from the company in March. Cohen allegedly took photos of sensitive information, the suit said, and downloaded the files onto her personal phone.
“At Percepta, they seek to succeed not through old-fashioned ingenuity and competition, but through outright theft and deceit,” Palantir said in the filing.
Among other things, Palantir is asking for the defendants to be forced to return any confidential information in their possession, and to avoid working at Percepta or venture backer General Catalyst for 12 months from the time of an order.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee confirmation hearing on President Donald Trump’s nominees to lead the National Economic Council, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Housing Finance Agency, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 27, 2025.
Warren also reiterated her call for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to testify before Congress about the agreement, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The senator’s fiery remarks on the Senate floor came three days after Trump announced on social media that the U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia could sell the chips to “approved customers” in China, so long as the U.S. gets a 25% cut of the revenues.
The announcement drew concerns both from Democrats and some of Trump’s Republican allies, who have been vocal about protecting America’s hardware advantage over China in the race to AI superiority.
Warren, in Thursday’s remarks, urged Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that “reins in this administration” by imposing new chip export restrictions. Critics of the bill say it could undermine U.S. chipmakers’ competitiveness.
The Trump administration knows that China gaining access to the chips, which have previously been subject to export restrictions, “poses a serious threat to our technological leadership and national security,” Warren said on the Senate floor.
She noted that shortly before Trump announced his decision on the H200 chips on Monday, the Department of Justice touted a crackdown touted a crackdown on a “major China-linked AI tech smuggling network.”
“So why did the President make this bad deal that sells out the American economy and sells out American national security?” she asked. “It’s simple: In the Trump administration, money talks.”
“Mr. Huang understands that in this administration, being able to cozy up to Donald Trump might be the most important corporate CEO skill of all,” Warren said.
She pointed to Huang attending a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Trump’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago, and Nvidia’s later donations to the president’s under-construction White House ballroom.
“Those are just the most obvious possible reasons to cut this deal,” Warren said, “and who knows what else Mr. Huang might have done behind closed doors to persuade President Trump and Secretary Lutnick into making this dangerous concession.”
CNBC has reached out to Nvidia for comment on the senator’s remarks.
The Axiom-4 mission, with a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, June 25, 2025.
Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images
Elon Musk responded to the latest report that SpaceX is going public in 2026, calling it “accurate.”
The article from Ars Technica’s Eric Berger examined why this is the right time for Musk’s space venture to IPO, and said the rise of artificial intelligence and opportunities for data centers in space play an important role in the move.
“As usual, Eric is accurate,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X in response to Berger’s article.
Musk’s comment comes after multiple news outlets said that SpaceX was looking to go public in 2026, with The Information and Wall Street Journal both reporting last week on the likeliness of an IPO, as well as a new share sale valuing the company at about $800 billion.
Bloomberg said this week that the company was pursuing an IPO in 2026 and is looking to raise more than $30 billion.
Over the weekend, Musk said on X that reports of the $800 billion valuation were “not accurate” and addressed the amount his company gets from NASA.
“While I have great fondness for @NASA, they will constitute less than 5% of our revenue next year,” Musk wrote. “Commercial Starlink is by far our largest contributor to revenue. Some people have claimed that SpaceX gets ‘subsidized’ by NASA. This is absolutely false.”
SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Heading into 2026, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk look set to gain a powerful ally in the government’s space program.
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Jared Isaacman, who paid millions to lead two private spaceflights with SpaceX in 2021 and 2024, is likely to become the next NASA administrator and was voted through committee on Monday.
He now heads to a full Senate vote for confirmation.
SpaceX is a key contractor for NASA, but acting administrator Sean Duffy has criticized Musk’s space operation for being behind on the Artemis moon trip, which has seen several delays.
Musk lashed out at Duffy, accusing him on X of “trying to kill NASA!”
Duffy, who is the secretary of transportation, was handed the reins of the space program this summer by President Donald Trump, after he pulled Isaacman’s nomination following a clash with Musk.
Trump said at the time that Isaacman’s relationship with Musk represented a conflict of interest.
The renomination of Isaacman at the beginning of November signaled that the relationship between Trump and Musk was on the mend, and the Tesla CEO’s attendance at a White House dinner later that month solidified the return to camaraderie.