says AI wasn’t the main factor

That's exactly what an Ai would say.

I actually kind of believe them on this. Like, the last team they’d want to cut back on if they were gung hoe on AI would be web services. Like, most “AI” companies aren’t hosting their own services, they’re relying on a third party to do that.

Admittedly AWS isn’t really built around providing what those companies need, being focused more on hosting websites (you know, a proven business model that actually makes profit) and less on massive racks of Nvidia GPUs to run probabilistic models.

But still, that’s a fairly small cut relatively speaking compared to Microsoft and other’s recent announcements. So I’m tempted to believe that theses are actually just fairly normal cuts, as supposed to what Microsoft is doing; cutting to the bone to free up more cash to buy a few more Nvidia GPUs.

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

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.

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

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.

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.