Amazon laying off 14,000 corporate workers, but Georgia impact unclear
Amazon is laying off about 14,000 corporate workers, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and the growth of artificial intelligence, the company announced Tuesday.
Amazon has a large footprint in Georgia, with a corporate office in Buckhead and nearly two dozen fulfillment and “sortation” centers across the state. But the local impact of the layoffs is unclear. In response to questions about whether any Georgia jobs would be cut, an Amazon spokesperson sent a copy of the company’s public blog post.
As of December, Amazon had 31,500 full- and part-time employees in Georgia, according to the company’s self-issued economic impact report, though it’s unclear how many of those are corporate positions. As of Tuesday morning, Amazon has not filed a notice with the state alerting it of layoffs.
In the company’s blog post, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said though the tech giant is performing well, the company needs to operate leaner as the world quickly changes.
“This generation of AI 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 market segments and altogether new ones),” Galetti wrote. “We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
But as Amazon cuts a part of its workforce, it is growing in others. There are currently 193 open full-time roles in Atlanta, with the vast majority in Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s cloud computing division.
Amazon is also investing billions of dollars in expanding data centers in Georgia. In January, the company announced it planned to spend at least $11 billion on new data center capacity in metro Atlanta to respond to the huge demand in computing power from the rise of generative AI.
This July, Amazon Web Services agreed to pay roughly $270 million to buy a 985-acre development site along I-75 in rural Lamar County, about an hour south of Atlanta.
Between 2010 to 2024, the tech giant invested $23.8 billion in the state, according to its economic impact report.
— Staff writers Drew Kann and Zachary Hansen contributed to this report.
About the Author
Mirtha Donastorg is a reporter on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s business team focusing on Black wealth, entrepreneurship, and minority-owned businesses as well as innovation at Atlanta’s HBCUs.
