Amazon has revealed plans for a fresh round of layoffs that will erase several hundred of the tech titan’s jobs in the Bay Area, cutbacks that will primarily affect workers in Santa Clara County.
The e-commerce company has decided to chop 643 jobs in the Bay Area, Amazon reported in a WARN letter that it sent to the state Employment Development Department.
The Amazon layoffs are being revealed on the heels of decisions by Facebook app owner Meta Platforms to slash 308 Menlo Park jobs and chip industry giant Applied Materials to cut 363 jobs, affecting workers in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale.
Bay Area tech companies have been cutting staffing in recent years following a hiring boom during the coronavirus outbreak to meet soaring demand for remote work and distance learning.
When that demand faded, tech companies began launching layoffs at elevated levels starting in 2022.
More recently, tech companies have been trimming staffing levels as they attempt to determine how they will respond to, and cope with, the dramatic shift to artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.
In the most recent rounds of layoffs affecting Bay Area workers, Amazon said it has decided to eliminate 391 jobs in Sunnyvale, 176 in Palo Alto, and 76 in Santa Clara, according to the WARN letter the company sent to the state EDD.
Seattle-based Amazon described the job cuts as permanent.
The Amazon layoffs are slated to occur on Jan. 26 of next year, the WARN letter stated. More job cuts could occur on Feb. 27 and March 27 in connection with these current Amazon staff reductions in the Bay Area, according to the WARN notice.
The tech company’s Bay Area job cuts are part of Amazon’s worldwide elimination of several thousand jobs.
In an Oct. 28 open letter to Amazon employees, Beth Galetti, an Amazon senior vice president of people experience and technology, sought to sketch out the rationale behind the staffing reductions.
“We’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs,” Galetti stated in the letter. “While this will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others, it will mean an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles.”
More job cuts could loom at Amazon in 2026 beyond these new staffing reductions, company executives warned its rank and file. The artificial intelligence boom has ushered in dramatic changes whose full evolution is unknown, the company said.
“The world is changing quickly,” Galetti stated. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet.”