Amazon plans to shrink its corporate workforce by about 14,000 people. The company notified employees across locations, including its Seattle headquarters, of their termination Tuesday.

Amazon did not answer questions about how many of the eliminated roles will be in its home state of Washington. Employees in locations from Sunnyvale to Austin to Seattle announced their layoffs in online forums and message boards.

Several employees speaking to KUOW anonymously said the repeated rounds of layoffs over the past few years have hurt morale, and that they’re increasingly asked to do more with less.

In an email to employees that was also published online, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said the layoffs are intended to increase efficiency and position Amazon strategically in the artificial intelligence era. She also acknowledged the tech industry’s unusual new habit of cutting jobs while reporting record revenue.

“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly,” she wrote. “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). We’re convinced 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.”

Amazon is spending tens of billions of dollars to build out hyperscale data centers across the country. The company has built a lucrative business selling cloud computing services to corporate customers. The data center building spree, nicknamed Project Rainier, will provide the computing power to train Amazon partner Anthropic’s AI models.

On Monday, several news outlets predicted a larger layoff of 30,000 employees. The cuts announced today are about half that size, but Galetti’s email suggested there could be additional cuts in the new year.

“Looking ahead to 2026, as Andy talked about earlier this year, we expect to continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains,” she wrote.

The layoff comes ahead of Amazon’s third-quarter earnings report Thursday.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.