AWS India recently laid off nearly 400 of the 450 Bedrock employees in Chennai and Bengaluru, said sources
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REUTERS/ANUSHREE FADNAVIS
As Amazon recalibrates its global operations, AWS India is facing the heat as the company has allegedly laid off nearly 400 of the 450 Bedrock employees in Chennai and Bengaluru, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Amazon Bedrock is a platform for building generative AI applications and agents at a production scale.
However, AWS has denied the extent of the layoffs. An AWS Spokesperson shared, “This estimate is wildly incorrect and exaggerates the number of Bedrock-focused employees impacted in India. We’ve been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy. This is helping us operate like the world’s largest start-up and let people who work at Amazon have even more ownership and even bigger impact. We have a strong team working on Bedrock, and we will continue to hire essential roles to develop this popular service for customers. We also continue to invest in Bedrock as it is a meaningful and growing business for AWS, powering generative AI applications for more than 100,000 organizations worldwide.”
According to an internal email from AWS Vice President Barry Cooks, reviewed by businessline, the changes are part of a broader push to implement a new strategy aimed at more closely aligning the company with its customers.
“Many of today’s changes are part of a broader effort to roll out a new strategy across our teams. We will review these strategy changes in more detail at an upcoming all-hands, but I want to highlight one significant shift,” he said.
He added in the mail that the company is placing a bet on SageMaker as the front door for AI training & customisation, high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, and quantum experimentation at AWS. He added that there are other changes in the teams that the leaders will roll out.
Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service designed to simplify the process of building, training, and deploying machine learning (ML) models.
‘Not as many hit’
Sources also shared that the layoffs have affected AWS and other units within Amazon in multiple locations, including the Bay Area, New York, and California in the US, and Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune in India. businessline had earlier reported that Amazon India will lay off around 1,100 employees as part of the global restructuring plans.
Between hiring and firing
In a blog post on January 28, the company said it was laying off approximately 16,000 employees across Amazon. This follows an earlier round in October that saw roughly 14,000 staff lose their jobs. According to media reports, these reductions were largely concentrated in corporate and technology-facing roles, including teams across AWS, retail operations, and internal support functions.
However, during the company’s Q3 2025 results, Amazon had announced that it plans to add hundreds of thousands of seasonal jobs this holiday season, including 250,000 in the US and 150,000 in India. Overall, it has 1,532,000 employees globally.
In Q3, AWS segment sales increased 20 per cent year-on-year to $33.0 billion. AWS segment’s operating income was $11.4 billion, compared with $10.4 billion in Q3 2024.
Andy Jassy, President and CEO, Amazon, had stated, “AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022, re-accelerating to 20.2 per cent y-o-y. We continue to see strong demand in AI and core infrastructure, and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity – adding more than 3.8 gigawatts in the past 12 months.”
Published on February 5, 2026