Amazon plans to eliminate 30,000 office jobs: Reports

SEATTLE

Amazon will lay off tens of thousands of office workers as the e-commerce and tech giant trims costs amid ramped-up investments in artificial intelligence, according to U.S. media reports.

Some 30,000 positions will be cut in a belt-tightening move as soon as this week, multiple news outlets reported.

The reduction will represent nearly 10 percent of the approximately 350,000 office jobs at Amazon but is reported not to affect the distribution and warehouse workforce that makes up the majority of the company's more than 1.5 million employees.

The planned cuts were reported by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other outlets citing anonymous sources.

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy has lauded the potential of AI to streamline workplace operations, from engaging with customers online to making offices more efficient.

Amazon will next report earnings tomorrow, and is among the tech titans under pressure to show the merit of huge investments in AI.

"AWS will be under pressure to both show revenue acceleration and operating margin improvement in light of its massive AI investments," Emarketer principal analyst Sky Canaves said, referring to Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit.

Amazon will also likely be pressed for details about a recent AWS outage.

Popular internet services ranging from streaming platforms to messaging services to banking were offline for hours last week due to an outage in Amazon's crucial cloud network, illustrating the extent to which internet life depends on the tech titan.