Amazon engineers blast company for spending billions on AI while cutting jobs: Desperate to build

Amazon engineers blasted their employer at a heated Seattle City Council hearing this week, accusing the tech giant of pouring billions into an AI-fueled data center boom while slashing tens of thousands of white-collar jobs.The criticism came as Seattle officials advanced a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data center developments, citing concerns about power consumption, water use and the strain that AI infrastructure could place on local resources.“It’s been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital, with most of it going to data centers and AI,” Patrick Schloesser, a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, told council members on Wednesday.“Meanwhile, the leaders at my company have laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the last eight months,” Schloesser said.“What that tells me is that Big Tech is desperate to build as much compute capacity as it can, as fast as it can.”The comments spotlight a growing tension inside Amazon as CEO Andy Jassy pushes an aggressive AI expansion while simultaneously carrying out one of the largest corporate workforce reductions in company history.Since October, Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs through two major rounds of layoffs as part of Jassy’s effort to flatten management structures and reduce bureaucracy.

The company announced approximately 14,000 corporate job cuts in October and another 16,000 in January.At the same time, Amazon has committed to spending approximately $200 billion on capital expenditures this year, with the majority earmarked for AI infrastructure and data centers, according to company disclosures cited during the hearing.The clash between workforce reductions and soaring AI investment has fueled criticism from some employees, particularly members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an activist group made up of current and former workers.Schloesser and fellow Amazon engineers Liesl Wigand and Darius Irani appeared before the Seattle City Cou...