Amazon has 1.5 million employees. I’m sure corporate side is a small chunk of that but a giant company cutting a few hundred doesn’t sound like big news?

They probably are not broadly lying about AI replacement being the main factor.

Turns out... Amazon runs AWS for businesses... and also Amazon.com the online retail megastore and logistics service.

Every other business is laying people off?

Less B2B AWS demand.

Everyone is now unemployed?

Less consumer demand, downsize all aspects of Amazon.com storefront and logistics.

...

I'd actually argue that any serious modern economist should be paying attention to AWS and other enterprise level, scalable server solutions...

... That's a leading indicator of at this point, of broad economic conditions.

If AWS and similar departments at similar companies... stop expanding so much, when the rest of the economy seems to be doing ok?

Yeah, that means growth in demand for basically core business software infrastructure is stalling, and it'll take 6 to 18 months to filter through to the rest of the economy and become apparent in other metrics.

The main factor was they were spending too much headcount. The AI was just a means to allow them to reduce spending.

Amazon cuts lots of jobs constantly. They have turnover requirements for pretty much all departments. They are notorious for firing people of they think they could replace with anyone higher performing, including people undergoing cancer treatment. In the industry being fired from Amazon is often seen as a right of passage.

Wonder if this will slow down the new data center builds?

That's funny because everyone I know at AWS recently said there was this big memo or meeting or something and they straight up said demand for some of their services and/or upsells has decreased because of prolific access to AI.