Amazon says layoffs are due to AI. The data says offshoring (bloomberry.com)

Amazon announced 14,000 corporate job cuts, framing them as “reducing bureaucracy” and freeing resources for AI. A deeper look at Revealera’s historical Amazon job-posting data since 2020 tells a different story: by classifying a set of “non‑offshored” countries (e.g., United States, UK, Germany, France, China, Australia, Singapore, Israel, etc.) and measuring the share of postings outside that list, the proportion of roles posted in lower‑cost locations (India, Eastern Europe, other parts of Asia and Latin America) rose from about 11% in early 2020 to roughly 28% today. That represents a 154% increase (2.5x) in planned offshore hiring over five years. For the AI/ML community this matters because it suggests Amazon’s corporate restructuring may be driven more by offshoring and cost optimization than purely by strategic reinvestment in AI. The trend can reshape where engineering and research talent are hired, affect collaboration across distributed teams, influence compensation and hiring models for ML roles, and shift where product knowledge and innovation concentrate. The analysis is based on job‑posting locations (not actual hires) and the underlying dataset has been open‑sourced for verification and further digging, enabling researchers and practitioners to probe the company’s real workforce strategy.