Amazon is reportedly laying off staff across its cloud division in India, with sources claiming that nearly 400 of the 450 Amazon Bedrock employees in Chennai and Bengaluru have been impacted. Amazon Bedrock is the company’s platform for building and scaling generative AI applications and agents. The layoffs are said to be part of a wider global reset that could see up to 30,000 roles eliminated.
However, Amazon Web Services has disputed the scale of the cuts. An AWS spokesperson said, “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.”
An internal email from AWS Vice President Barry Cooks said the changes reflect a broader strategy shift to better align teams with customer needs. “Many of today’s changes are part of a broader effort to roll out a new strategy across our teams,” he wrote, adding that the company is placing a bet on Amazon SageMaker as the primary platform for AI training and customisation, high-performance computing workloads, and quantum experimentation at AWS.
Sources said the layoffs have affected AWS and other Amazon units across locations including the Bay Area, New York, and California in the US, and Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune in India. Earlier reports indicated Amazon India could cut around 1,100 roles as part of the restructuring.
In a blog post dated January 28, Amazon confirmed it was laying off about 16,000 employees globally, following an earlier reduction of roughly 14,000 roles in October. These cuts have largely targeted corporate and technology-facing teams, including AWS and internal support functions.
Despite the reductions, Amazon said it plans to add large numbers of seasonal workers. During its Q3 2025 results, the company announced plans to hire 250,000 seasonal staff in the US and 150,000 in India. Amazon currently employs about 1,532,000 people worldwide.
AWS posted strong financial performance in Q3, with segment sales rising 20% year-on-year to $33.0 billion and operating income reaching $11.4 billion. Commenting on the results, Andy Jassy said, “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.”
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