The nation’s largest e-commerce retailer continues to pivot from human employees to AI with plans to lay off 16,000 employees and a possible investment of $50 billion into OpenAI, according to recent reports. Amazon’s plans to lay off another 16,000 corporate employees comes on top of layoffs of 14,000 employees in late October, according to the New York Times. The layoffs are not due to profitability; the company has been producing profits of over $20 billion in each of the last two quarters. Amazon has attributed the layoffs to a desire to reduce bureaucracy and improve profitability. Amazon is also planning to replace over 500,000 of its warehouse employees with robots in the coming years, according to a separate New York Times report from last fall.
Meanwhile, Amazon is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in AI start-up OpenAI in a fundraising round that may raise up to $100 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI is purchasing $38 billion of computing services from Amazon’s AWS over the coming years, so the cash may flow both ways.
Amazon is investing in a new retailing direction by opening its first supercenter in 2027 (see “Amazon Opening First Supercenter”).
Source: ICv2
