Amazon said new positions will be offered to employees where possible.
The layoffs are in line with a trend in big tech to trim white-collar management jobs. Microsoft in July said it had slashed a little less than four percent of its global workforce, about 15,000 jobs.
CEO Andy Jassy said in October, after the first round of layoffs, that the cuts were not related to budget or AI investments.
“Really, it’s culture,” he said, decrying too many layers of management.
Facebook owner Meta has also cut jobs over the past year, in a move intended to remove organisational bloat following aggressive hiring during the pandemic.
Dutch tech giant ASML has said it would cut hundreds of management jobs to improve internal organisation, with HP and Oracle also announcing recent layoffs.
Like other tech giants, Amazon is making massive investments to grab a slice of the AI revolution pie.
It is particularly banking on the performance of its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s leading cloud provider, which is engaged in a race against its fast-growing rivals, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Spending on developing new AI-based chips and services is growing exponentially. In December, Amazon announced it would invest more than US$35b ($58b) in India.
– Agence France-Presse