Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at the GeekWire Summit in 2021. (GeekWire File Photo / Dan DeLong)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s latest big round of layoffs — about 14,000 corporate jobs — wasn’t triggered by financial strain or artificial intelligence replacing workers, but rather a push to stay nimble.
Speaking with analysts on Amazon’s quarterly earnings call Thursday, Jassy said the decision stemmed from a belief that the company had grown too big and too layered.
“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven — not right now, at least,” he said. “Really, it’s culture.”
Jassy’s comments are his first public explanation of the layoffs, which reportedly could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people — and would be the largest workforce reduction in Amazon’s history.
The news this week prompted speculation that the cuts were tied to automation or AI-related restructuring. Earlier this year, Jassy wrote in a memo to employees that he expected Amazon’s total corporate workforce to shrink over time due to efficiency gains from AI.
But his comments Thursday framed the layoffs as a cultural reset aimed at keeping the company fast-moving amid what he called “the technology transformation happening right now.”
Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in mid-2021, has pushed to reduce management layers and eliminate bureaucracy inside the company.
Amazon’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information, before the company adopted a more cautious hiring approach.
Bloomberg News reported this week that Jassy has told colleagues parts of the company remain “unwieldy” despite efforts to streamline operations — including significant layoffs in 2023 when Amazon cut 27,000 corporate workers in multiple stages.
On Thursday’s call, Jassy said Amazon’s rapid growth led to extra layers of management that slowed decision-making.
“When that happens, sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions — the ones that should be made quickly and right at the front line,” Jassy said, using a phrase popularized by Bezos to help determine how much thought and planning to put into big and small decisions.
The layoffs, he said, are meant to restore the kind of ownership and agility that defined Amazon’s early years.
“We are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy said, repeating a line he’s used recently.
Given the “transformation” he described happening across the business world, Jassy said it’s more important than ever to be lean, flat, and fast-moving. “That’s what we’re going to do,” he said.
Jassy’s comments came as Amazon reported quarterly revenue of $180.2 billion, up 13% year-over-year, with AWS revenue growth accelerating to 20% — its fastest pace since 2022.
Amazon said it took a $1.8 billion severance-related charge in the quarter related to the layoffs.
Amazon joins other tech giants including Microsoft that have trimmed headcount this year while investing heavily in AI infrastructure.
An Amazon Prime delivery van outside the company’s Seattle headquarters. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Amazon beat estimates for its third-quarter earnings with $180.2 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year, and earnings per share of $1.95, up from $1.43 in the year-ago period.
Net income was $21.2 billion, up from $15.3 billion last year.
Wall Street expected $177.7 billion in revenue, and earnings per share of $1.56.
Amazon shares were up more than 11% in after-hours trading. Growth in the company’s stock has lagged behind rivals Microsoft and Google this year.
Investors were likely pleased with a re-acceleration in Amazon’s closely watched cloud computing unit, which reported $33 billion in sales, up 20% year-over-year and topping analyst estimates. In a press release, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said AWS is “growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022.”
“We continue to see strong demand in AI and core infrastructure, and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity — adding more than 3.8 gigawatts in the past 12 months,” Jassy added.
The cloud growth should help Amazon counter the Wall Street narrative that its cloud business is falling behind Microsoft and Google in pursuing the AI opportunity.
Amazon and other cloud giants are pouring billions of dollars into capital expenditures to support AI initiatives. Amazon said earlier this year it expects to increase capital expenditures to more than $100 billion in 2025.
The company makes most of its operating profits from AWS — $11.4 billion in the third quarter, more than half Amazon’s total operating income.
AWS was hit with a major outage last week that took down several major sites and services. It blamed an internal issue within the cloud giant’s infrastructure.
Amazon’s overall operating income reached $17.4 billion in the third quarter — flat compared to a year ago. The company had forecast operating income of $15.5 billion to $20.5 billion.
The company said its Q3 operating income reflected two special charges:
A $2.5 billion charge related to a recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission related to Prime memberships.
About $1.8 billion in estimated severance costs related to its massive 14,000 corporate layoff announced earlier this week.
The workforce reduction comes amid an efficiency push at Amazon. Jassy has cited a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence.
Reuters reported this week that the number of layoffs could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people, which is still a possibility as the cutbacks continue into next year.
Jassy told employees in a company-wide memo earlier this year that Amazon’s corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as generative AI takes hold.
Online store sales were $67.4 billion, up 10%.
The revenue includes sales from the company’s annual Prime Day sales event from July 8-11.
Analysts are watching for impact from tariffs on the company’s retail business, which still makes up the largest portion of its overall revenue.
In its Q1 earnings report in April, Amazon added “tariff and trade policies” to a list of factors that create uncertainty in its results, joining existing risks such as inflation, interest rates, and regional labor market constraints.
Here are more details from the second quarter earnings report:
Advertising: The company’s ad business brought in $17.7 billion in revenue in the quarter, up 24% from the year-ago period, topping estimates. Advertising, along with AWS, is a major profit engine.
Third-party seller services: Revenue from third-party seller services was up 12% to $42.5 billion.
Shipping costs: Amazon spent $25.4 billion on shipping in Q3, up 8%.
Physical stores: The category, which includes Whole Foods and other Amazon grocery stores, posted revenue of $5.6 billion, up 7%.
Headcount: Amazon employs 1.57 million people, up 2% year-over-year. That figure does not include seasonal and contract workers.
Prime: Subscription services revenue, which includes Prime memberships, came in at $12.6 billion, up 11%.
Guidance: The company forecasts Q4 sales between $206 billion and $213 billion. Operating income is expected to range between $21 billion and $26 billion, compared with $21.2 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Magdalena Balazinska, director of the UW Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, opens the school’s annual research showcase Wednesday in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
The University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering is reframing what it means for its research to change the world.
In unveiling six “Grand Challenges” at its annual Research Showcase and Open House in Seattle on Wednesday, the Allen School’s leaders described a blueprint for technology that protects privacy, supports mental health, broadens accessibility, earns public trust, and sustains people and the planet.
The idea is to “organize ourselves into some more specific grand challenges that we can tackle together to have an even greater impact,” said Magdalena Balazinska, director of the Allen School and a UW computer science professor, opening the school’s annual Research Showcase and Open House.
Here are the six grand challenges:
Anticipate and address security, privacy, and safety issues as tech permeates society.
Make high-quality cognitive and mental health support available to all.
Design technology to be accessible at its inception — not as an add-on.
Design AI in a way that is transparent and equally beneficial to all.
Build systems that can be trusted to do exactly what we want them to do, every time.
Create technologies that sustain people and the planet.
Balazinska explained that the list draws on the strengths and interests of its faculty, who now number more than 90, including 74 on the tenure track.
With total enrollment of about 2,900 students, last year the Allen School graduated more than 600 undergrads, 150 master’s students, and 50 Ph.D. students.
The Allen School has grown so large that subfields like systems and NLP (natural language processing) risk becoming isolated “mini departments,” said Shwetak Patel, a University of Washington computer science professor. The Grand Challenges initiative emerged as a bottom-up effort to reconnect these groups around shared, human-centered problems.
Patel said the initiative also encourages collaborations on campus beyond the computer science school, citing examples like fetal heart rate monitoring with UW Medicine.
A serial entrepreneur and 2011 MacArthur Fellow, Patel recalled that when he joined UW 18 years ago, his applied and entrepreneurial focus was seen as unconventional. Now it’s central to the school’s direction. The grand challenges initiative is “music to my ears,” Patel said.
In tackling these challenges, the Allen School has a unique advantage against many other computer science schools. Eighteen faculty members currently hold what’s known as “concurrent engagements” — formally splitting time between the Allen School and companies and organizations such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2).
University of Washington computer science professor Shwetak Patel at the Paul G. Allen School’s annual research showcase and open house. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)
This is a “superpower” for the Allen School, said Patel, who has a concurrent engagement at Google. These arrangements, he explained, give faculty and students access to data, computing resources, and real-world challenges by working directly with companies developing the most advanced AI systems.
“A lot of the problems we’re trying to solve, you cannot solve them just at the university,” Patel said, pointing to examples such as open-source foundation models and AI for mental-health research that depend on large-scale resources unavailable in academia alone.
These roles can also stretch professors thin. “When somebody’s split, there’s only so much mental energy you can put into the university,” Patel said. Many of those faculty members teach just one or two courses a year, requiring the school to rely more on lecturers and teaching faculty.
Still, he said, the benefits outweigh the costs. “I’d rather have 50% of somebody than 0% of somebody, and we’ll make it work,” he said. “That’s been our strategy.”
The Madrona Prize, an annual award presented at the event by the Seattle-based venture capital firm, went to a project called “Enhancing Personalized Multi-Turn Dialogue with Curiosity Reward.” The system makes AI chatbots more personal by giving them a “curiosity reward,” motivating the AI to actively learn about a user’s traits during a conversation to create more personalized interactions.
On the subject of industry collaborations, the lead researcher on the prize-winning project, UW Ph.D. student Yanming Wan, conducted the research while working as an intern at Google DeepMind. (See full list of winners and runners-up below.)
At the evening poster session, graduate students filled the rooms to showcase their latest projects — including new advances in artificial intelligence for speech, language, and accessibility.
DopFone: Doppler-based fetal heart rate monitoring using commodity smartphones
Poojita Garg, a second-year PhD student.
DopFone transforms phones into fetal heart rate monitors. It uses the phone speaker to transmit a continuous sine wave and uses the microphone to record the reflections. It then processes the audio recordings to estimate fetal heart rate. It aims to be an alternative to doppler ultrasounds that require trained staff, which aren’t practical for frequent remote use.
“The major impact would be in the rural, remote and low-resource settings where access to such maternity care is less — also called maternity care deserts,” said Poojita Garg, a second-year PhD student.
CourseSLM: A Chatbot Tool for Supporting Instructors and Classroom Learning
Marquiese Garrett, a sophomore at the UW.
This custom-built chatbot is designed to help students stay focused and build real understanding rather than relying on quick shortcuts. The system uses built-in guardrails to keep learners on task and counter the distractions and over-dependence that can come with general large language models.
Running locally on school devices, the chatbot helps protect student data and ensures access even without Wi-Fi.
“We’re focused on making sure students have access to technology, and know how to use it properly and safely,” said Marquiese Garrett, a sophomore at the UW.
Efficient serving of SpeechLMs with VoxServe
Keisuke Kamahori, a third-year PhD student at the Allen School.
VoxServe makes speech-language models run more efficiently. It uses a standardized abstraction layer and interface that allows many different models to run through a single system. Its key innovation is a custom scheduling algorithm that optimizes performance depending on the use case.
The approach makes speech-based AI systems faster, cheaper, and easier to deploy, paving the way for real-time voice assistants and other next-gen speech applications.
“I thought it would be beneficial if we can provide this sort of open-source system that people can use,” said Keisuke Kamahori, third-year Ph.D. student at the Allen School.
ConvFill: Model collaboration for responsive conversational voice agents
Zachary Englhardt (left), a fourth-year PhD student, and Vidya Srinivas, a third-year PhD student.
ConvFill is a lightweight conversational model designed to reduce the delay in voice-based large language models. The system responds quickly with short, initial answers, then fills in more detailed information as larger models complete their processing.
By combining small and large models in this way, ConvFill delivers faster responses while conserving tokens and improving efficiency — an important step toward more natural, low-latency conversational AI.
“This is an exciting way to think about how we can combine systems together to get the best of both worlds,” said Zachary Englhardt, a third-year Ph.D. student. “It’s an exciting way to look at problems.”
ConsumerBench: Benchmarking generative AI on end-user devices
Yile Gu, a third-year PhD student at the Allen School.
Running generative AI locally — on laptops, phones, or other personal hardware — introduces new system-level challenges in fairness, efficiency, and scheduling.
ConsumerBench is a benchmarking framework that tests how well generative AI applications perform on consumer hardware when multiple AI models run at the same time. The open-source tool helps researchers identify bottlenecks and improve performance on consumer devices.
There are a number of benefits to running models locally: “There are privacy purposes — a user can ask for questions related to email or private content, and they can do it efficiently and accurately,” said Yile Gu, a third-year Ph.D. student at the Allen School.
Designing Chatbots for Sensitive Health Contexts: Lessons from Contraceptive Care in Kenyan Pharmacies
Lisa Orii, a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Allen School.
A project aimed at improving contraceptive access and guidance for adolescent girls and young women in Kenya by integrating low-fidelity chatbots into healthcare settings. The goal is to understand how chatbots can support private, informed conversations and work effectively within pharmacies.
“The fuel behind this whole project is that my team is really interested in improving health outcomes for vulnerable populations,” said Lisa Orii, a fifth-year Ph.D. student.
See more about the research showcase here. Here’s the list of winning projects.
Runner up: “VAMOS: A Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Model for Capability-Modulated and Steerable Navigation” Mateo Guaman Castro, Sidharth Rajagopal, Daniel Gorbatov, Matt Schmittle, Rohan Baijal, Octi Zhang, Rosario Scalise, Sidharth Talia, Emma Romig, Celso de Melo, Byron Boots, Abhishek Gupta
Runner up: “Dynamic 6DOF VR reconstruction from monocular videos” Baback Elmieh, Steve Seitz, Ira-Kemelmacher, Brian Curless
People’s Choice: “MolmoAct” Jason Lee, Jiafei Duan, Haoquan Fang, Yuquan Deng, Shuo Liu, Boyang Li, Bohan Fang, Jieyu Zhang, Yi Ru Wang, Sangho Lee, Winson Han, Wilbert Pumacay, Angelica Wu, Rose Hendrix, Karen Farley, Eli VanderBilt, Ali Farhadi, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna
Editor’s Note: The University of Washington underwrites GeekWire’s coverage of artificial intelligence. Content is under the sole discretion of the GeekWire editorial team. Learn more about underwritten content on GeekWire.
Live-shopping startup Whatnot plans to grow its new Seattle outpost following a $225 million funding round announced this week.
The company aims to hire more than 75 employees in the region over the next six months — tripling its current local headcount — across product, engineering, and related roles.
Whatnot opened its downtown Seattle office earlier this year. The Los Angeles-based company, now valued at $11.5 billion (up from $5 billion a year ago), said the Seattle expansion is one of its largest talent investments to date.
Founded in 2019, Whatnot’s platform mixes e-commerce and livestream entertainment. Sellers host live video shows on the Whatnot app or website, auctioning or selling products in real time. Buyers can watch, chat, and bid directly during live streams.
The New York Times described the trend as “QVC for the TikTok era.” Whatnot competes against the likes of TikTok (TikTok Shop) and Seattle-based e-commerce giant Amazon (Amazon Live).
Whatnot facilitates transactions between buyers and sellers, and handles payments, logistics, and safety features. The company earns revenue by taking a commission — typically around 8% — on sales made by sellers ranging from independent entrepreneurs to established retailers.
Whatnot more than doubled live sales on its platform this year, to $6 billion. Buyers spend more than 80 minutes per day on Whatnot’s live shows, according to the company. Whatnot is not profitable.
Some of its fastest-growing categories include beauty, women’s fashion, handbags, electronics, antiques, coins, golf, snacks, and live plants.
The company’s Seattle office focuses on product and engineering,including areas such as machine learning, marketplace integrity, and trust & safety. Whatnot has 900 employees across its workforce.
Dan Bear, vice president of engineering, and Kelda Murphy, vice president of talent acquisition, are both based in Seattle. Bear previously opened Seattle offices for Snap, Hulu, and CloudKitchens.
Whatnot is one of more than 130 companies that operate satellite offices in the Seattle region, tapping into the area’s technical talent pool.
The company has 31 open positions on its jobs page. It is hosting an engineering and product networking event in Seattle on Nov. 4.
Amazon’s headquarters towers and The Spheres in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Software development engineers make up the largest group of employees affected by Amazon’s latest round of layoffs in its home state.
GeekWire reported Tuesday on a new filing from the Washington Employment Security Department revealing that the tech giant is laying off 2,303 corporate employees, mostly in Seattle and Bellevue. The cuts are part of broader layoffs announced Tuesday that will impact about 14,000 workers globally.
A detailed list included with the state filing reveals which roles are impacted by the layoffs. More than 600 software development engineering roles are being cut among the 2,303 affected workers in Washington — more than a quarter of total cuts.
The trend mirrors layoffs at Microsoft earlier this year, as companies reassess their engineering needs amid the rise of AI-driven coding tools. Amazon itself recently introduced its own AI coding tool Kiro in July, and has reportedly explored adopting the AI code assistant Cursor for employees.
The layoffs of software engineers reflect a striking shift for an industry that has traditionally relied on coders to help build and maintain the backbone of digital platforms.
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” Amazon HR chief Beth Galetti wrote in a message to employees Tuesday, saying it’s enabling teams to “innovate much faster than ever before.”
Amazon’s engineering layoffs are part of a broader industry reckoning with AI’s impact on traditional tech roles and white-collar jobs. A Wall Street Journal report this week detailed how the adoption of AI is contributing to a wave of layoffs across the country. Axios published a story Wednesday on a similar topic with the headline: How an AI job apocalypse unfolds.
More than 500 manager-level titles were also heavily affected by Amazon’s layoffs in Washington, according to the filing — aligning with a company-wide push to use the cutbacks to help reduce bureaucracy and operate more efficiently.
Amazon also made reductions in recruiting and HR roles. Other impacted areas include marketing, advertising, and legal.
The largest single site impact is at SEA40, Amazon’s Doppler office building on 7th Avenue in Seattle, where 361 employees are affected, according to the filing.
More than 100 remote employees based in Washington are also being let go.
TestSprite founders Yunhao Jiao (left) and Rui Li. (TestSprite Photo)
In the era of AI-generated software, developers still need to make sure their code is clean. That’s where TestSprite wants to help.
The Seattle startup announced $6.7 million in seed funding to expand its platform that automatically tests and monitors code written by AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf.
TestSprite’s autonomous agent integrates directly into development environments, running tests throughout the coding process rather than as a separate step after deployment.
“As AI writes more code, validation becomes the bottleneck,” said CEO Yunhao Jiao. “TestSprite solves that by making testing autonomous and continuous, matching AI speed.”
The platform can generate and run front- and back-end tests during development to ensure AI-written code works as expected, help AI IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) fix software based on TestSprite’s integration testing reports, and continuously update and rerun test cases to monitor deployed software for ongoing reliability.
Founded last year, TestSprite says its user base grew from 6,000 to 35,000 in three months, and revenue has doubled each month since launching its 2.0 version and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration. The company employs about 25 people.
Jiao is a former engineer at Amazon and a natural language processing researcher. He co-founded TestSprite with Rui Li, a former Google engineer.
Jiao said TestSprite doesn’t compete with AI coding copilots, but complements them by focusing on continuous validation and test generation. Developers can trigger tests using simple natural-language commands, such as “Test my payment-related features,” directly inside their IDEs.
The seed round was led by Bellevue, Wash.-based Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from Techstars, Jinqiu Capital, MiraclePlus, Hat-trick Capital, Baidu Ventures, and EdgeCase Capital Partners. Total funding to date is about $8.1 million.
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson speaks at Seattle AI Week, at the AI House on Pier 70 along the city’s waterfront. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson is threading the needle when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Ferguson made a brief appearance at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week on Monday evening, speaking at AI House on Pier 70 about his approach to governing the consequential technology.
“I view my job as maximizing the benefits and minimizing harms,” said Ferguson, who took office earlier this year.
Ferguson called AI one of the “top five biggest challenges” he thinks about daily, both professionally and personally.
In a follow-up interview with GeekWire, the governor said AI “could totally transform our government, as well as the private sector, in many ways.”
His comments came just as Amazon, the largest employer in Washington state, said it would eliminate about 14,000 corporate jobs, citing a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence.
Ferguson told the crowd that the future of work and “loss of jobs that come with the technology” is on his mind.
The governor highlighted Washington’s AI Task Force,created during his tenure as attorney general, which is studying issues from algorithmic bias to data security. The group’s next set of recommendations arrives later this year and could shape upcoming legislation, he said.
States are moving ahead with their own AI rules in the absence of a comprehensive federal framework. Washington appears to sit in the pragmatic middle of this fast-moving regulatory landscape — using executive action and an expert task force to build guidelines, while watching experiments in states such as California and Colorado.
Seattle city leaders are also getting involved. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell last month announced a “responsible AI plan” that provides guidelines for Seattle’s use of artificial intelligence and its support of the AI tech sector as an economic driver.
(GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)
Ferguson said he’s aware of how AI can “really revolutionize our economy and state in so many ways,” from healthcare to education to wildfire detection.
But he also flagged his concerns — both as a policymaker and parent. The governor, who has 17-year-old twins, said he worries about the technology’s impact on young people, referencing reports of teen suicides linked to AI chatbots.
Despite those concerns, Ferguson maintained an upbeat tone during his remarks at Seattle AI Week, citing the region’s technical talent and economic opportunity from the technology.
He noted that the state, amid a $16 billion budget shortfall this year, kept $300,000 in funding for the AI House, the new waterfront startup hub that hosted Monday’s event.
“There is no better place anywhere in the United States for this innovation than right here in the Northwest,” he said.
Meta’s office at Dexter Station in Seattle. (Meta Photo)
Meta plans to lay off more than 100 employees in Washington state as part of a broader round of cuts within its artificial intelligence division.
A new filing with the state’s Employment Security Department shows 101 employees impacted, including 48 in Bellevue, 23 in Seattle, and four in Redmond, along with 23 remote workers based in Washington.
The filing lists dozens of affected roles across Meta’s AI research and infrastructure units, including software engineers, AI researchers, and data scientists. Meta product managers, privacy specialists, and compliance analysts were also affected.
Meta is cutting around 600 positions in its AI unit, Axios reported last week. The company is investing heavily in AI and wants to create a “more agile operation,” according to an internal memo cited by Axios. Meta has just under 3,000 roles within its superintelligence lab, CNBC reported.
The separations at Meta in Washington take effect Dec. 22, according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice filed Oct. 22.
Meta employs thousands of people across multiple offices in the Seattle region, one of its largest engineering hubs outside Menlo Park.
The latest reductions mark another contraction for Meta’s Pacific Northwest footprint following multiple rounds of layoffs over the past several years.
The company’s rapid expansion in Seattle over the past decade made it one of the emblems of the region’s tech boom, coinciding with Microsoft’s resurgence and Amazon’s rise.
Among the Bay Area titans, Google was among the first to establish a Seattle-area engineering office, way back in 2004. However, it was Facebook’s decision to open its own outpost across from Pike Place Market in 2010 that really got the attention of their Silicon Valley tech brethren.
The Meta Open Arts maker space in Block 16 in Bellevue’s Spring District. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
However, more recently Meta has made moves to trim its Seattle-area footprint.
Apple earlier this year took over a building previously occupied by Meta in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, near Amazon’s headquarters. CoStar reported in April that Meta listed its other Arbor Blocks building for sublease.
Meta previously gobbled up much of the planned office space at the Spring District, a sprawling development northeast of downtown Bellevue, including a building that was originally going to be a new REI headquarters. But it has subleased some of the space since then to companies such as Snowflake, which recently took an entire building from Meta at the Spring District.
Meta’s office in Redmond, near Microsoft’s headquarters, is focused on its mixed reality development.
GeekWire has reached out to the company for an updated Seattle-area headcount.
Original story: Amazon is preparing to lay off as many as 30,000 corporate employees in a sweeping workforce reduction intended to reduce expenses and compensate for over-hiring during the pandemic, according to a report from Reuters on Monday.
GeekWire has contacted Amazon for comment.
Layoff notifications will start going out via email on Tuesday, according to Reuters, which cited people familiar with the matter. One employee at Amazon told GeekWire the workforce is on “pins and needles” in anticipation of cuts.
Bloomberg reported that cuts will impact several business units, including logistics, payments, video games, and Amazon Web Services.
Amazon’s corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 in early 2023. It has not provided an updated number since then.
The company’s last significant layoff occurred in 2023 when it cut 27,000 corporate workers in multiple stages. Since then the company has made a series of smaller layoffs across different business units.
Fortune reported this month that Amazon planned to cut up to 15% of its human resources staff as part of a wider layoff.
Amazon has taken a cautious hiring approach with its corporate workforce, following years of huge headcount growth. The company’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information.
The reported cuts come as Amazon is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. The company said earlier this year it expects to increase capital expenditures to more than $100 billion in 2025, up from $83 billion in 2024, with a majority going toward building out capacity for AI in AWS.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” he wrote. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
Amazon reported 1.54 million total employees as of June 30 — up 3% year-over-year. The majority of the company’s workforce is made up of warehouse workers.
Amazon employs roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers in buildings across its Seattle headquarters, with another 12,000 in Bellevue.
The company reports its third quarter earnings on Thursday afternoon.
Fellow Seattle-area tech giant Microsoft has laid off more than 15,000 people since May as it too invests in AI and data center capacity. Microsoft has cut more than 3,200 roles in Washington this year.
Last week, The New York Times cited internal Amazon documents and interviews to report that the company plans to automate as much as 75% of its warehouse operations by 2033. According to the report, the robotics team expects automation to “flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” allowing it to avoid hiring more than 600,000 workers even as sales continue to grow.
GeekWire reporter Kurt Schlosser contributed to this story.
Pioneer Square Labs has launched more than 40 tech startups and vetted 500-plus ideas since creating its studio a decade ago in Seattle.
Now it’s testing whether its company-building expertise and data on successful startup formulas can be codified into software — with help from the latest AI models.
PSL just unveiled Lev, a new project that aims to be an “AI co-founder” for early stage entrepreneurs.
Developed inside PSL and now rolling out publicly, Lev can evaluate ideas, score their potential, and help founders develop them into companies.
Lev grew out of an internal PSL tool that used PSL’s proprietary rubric to score startup ideas. The studio decided to turn it into a product after outside founders who tested early versions wanted access for themselves.
Here’s how it works:
Users start by entering an idea (along with any associated information/background) and selecting “venture” or “bootstrap.”
Lev walks founders through milestones from solution to customer discovery, go-to-market, and product build.
It can generate “assets” like interview scripts, outreach templates, competitive maps, pricing models, brand palettes, customer personas, landing pages, potential leads, and even product specs.
“We’re mapping a lot of the PSL process into it,” said T.A. McCann, managing director at PSL.
Lev’s structured workflow sets it apart from generic chatbots, said Shilpa Kannan, principal at PSL.
“The sequencing of these components as you go through the process is one of the biggest value-adds,” she said.
Lev joins a growingnumber of startups leveraging AI to act as an idea validation tool for early-stage founders, though its precise approach makes it stand out.
Pioneer Square Labs Managing Director T.A. McCann (left) and Principal Shilpa Kannan. (PSL Photos)
Upcoming features will add team-building and fundraising modules and let users trigger actions — such as sending emails or buying domains — directly from within the platform.
McCann envisions Lev eventually connecting to tools like Notion and HubSpot to serve as a “command center” for running a company — integrating tools, drafting investor updates, tracking competitors, and suggesting priorities. There are several competitors in this space offering different versions of “AI chief of staff” products.
On a broader level, Lev raises an existential question for PSL: what happens when a startup studio teaches an AI to do the things that make a startup studio valuable?
“In some ways, this is ‘Innovators Dilemma,’ and you have to cannibalize yourself before someone else does it,” McCann said, referencing Clayton Christensen’s concept of technology disruption.
PSL also sees Lev as a potential funnel for entrepreneurs it could work with in the future. And it’s a way to expand the studio’s reach beyond its focus on the Pacific Northwest.
“It’s scaling our knowledge in a way that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise,” McCann said.
Kannan and Kevin Leneway, principal at PSL, wrote a blog post describing how PSL designed the backbone of Lev and how the firm generated its own startup ideas at higher volumes with lower cost.
“As we see more and more individuals become founders with the support of AI, we are incredibly excited for the potential increase in velocity and successful outcomes from methodologies like ours that focus on upfront ideation and validation,” they wrote.
Kannan told GeekWire that PSL is prioritizing founders’ privacy and intellectual property. “We are making intentional product and technical decisions to ensure Lev is designed from the ground up to safeguard ideas and founder data, including guardrails on data we collect and our team can access,” she said.
For now, PSL is targeting venture-scale founders — people in tech companies or accelerators with ambitions to build fast-growing startups. But McCann believes Lev could eventually empower solo operators running multiple micro-businesses.
Lev is currently free for one idea, $20 per month for up to five ideas, and $100 per month for 10 ideas and advanced features. It’s available on a waitlist basis.
Lev also offers a couple fun tools to help boost its own marketing, including a founder “personality test” and an “idea matcher” that produces startup concepts based on your interests and experience.
— Deb Hall Lefevre, the longtime tech exec who was most recently CTO at Starbucks, announced her retirement on Sunday in a LinkedIn post.
Hall Lefevre resigned from Starbucks last month, according to a Sept. 26 report from Reuters, which cited a memo sent to staff about her departure.
The move came amid layoffs and various tech-related changes at the Seattle coffee giant.
“After an incredible journey leading technology and digital transformation across some of the world’s most iconic brands, including Starbucks, Circle K/Couche Tard and McDonald’s, it’s time to step into retirement,” Hall Lefevre said in her LinkedIn post.
“As I turn the page, I look forward to more time with family, continuing my tech and board work, and cheering on the next generation of leaders shaping the future,” she added.
Hall Lefevre, who was also an executive vice president, joined Starbucks in 2022. She previously spent more than 16 years at McDonald’s, where she was a corporate vice president and CIO, leading the fast food giant’s technology and digital commerce strategy. She was also EVP and CTO at Circle K Stores.
Ningyu Chen, who was senior vice president of global experience technology, is now interim chief technology officer at Starbucks.
Starbucks last month announced plans to lay off around 900 non-retail employees and close underperforming stores mainly in the U.S. and Canada. Starbucks previously cut 1,100 corporate workers in February.
Under the leadership of CEO Brian Niccol, the former Chipotle CEO who joined the company last year, Starbucks is making a bevy of technology tweaks as it tries to curb slumping sales.
— Lindo St. Angel, vice president of hardware for Amazon’s Lab126 devices group, is departing at the end of the month. Reuters first reported the news.
St. Angel joined Lab126 in 2010. The business unit, based in Silicon Valley, launched in 2004 and helped develop Amazon devices such as the Kindle Fire, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and other hardware.
— Mark Jewett joined New York City health data company Komodo Health as chief marketing officer. Jewett was previously a senior vice president at Informatica and CMO at SmartRecruiters. He also was a SVP and co-interim CMO at Tableau, and spent 15 years at Microsoft in various leadership roles.
Founded in 2014, Komodo Health reached a $3.3 billion valuation in 2021. The company helps healthcare stakeholders integrate data and generate insights related to treatment, research, and more.
Nancy Mounir. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Nancy Mounir joined Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a vice president leading security programs and platforms.
Mounir previously spent more than 12 years at Microsoft, most recently as a senior director and chief of staff overseeing the company’s Secure Future Initiative.
In a LinkedIn post, Mounir said she is “looking forward to a great journey of learning, innovation and growth with the Security Platform team!”
She added: “Extremely grateful for my time at Microsoft and could not be more proud of what we accomplished together over the years!”
Mounir initially worked at Microsoft from 2012 to 2015 in supply chain, and left to spend a year at Amazon working on advertising and accounting teams. She returned to Microsoft in 2016.
— Priya Vaidyanathan took a new role at Microsoft as director of product and design for Microsoft’s AI skilling platform. Vaidyanathan returned to Microsoft in 2020 after two previous stints and was most recently a group product manager. She previously founded a mealkit startup called SnapCurry and was a senior technical product manager at Amazon.
“This next chapter is about helping people everywhere gain the skills and confidence to grow with AI, creating opportunity, resilience, and impact at every level,” she wrote on LinkedIn.
— Jim Chi was named executive director of Oregon Startup Center, which is going through a relaunch, according to Portland Business Journal. Chi is also president of Oregon Sports Angels and is a longtime product management leader.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is interviewed during Amazon’s first-ever live streamed NBA game on Friday. (Screenshots via Prime Video stream)
“It is here, it is real, it is happening,” said play-by-play announcer Ian Eagle. “The NBA on Prime.”
And with that, Amazon’s foray into live streaming NBA games tipped off.
Amazon marked a major milestone with its growing sports portfolio on Friday, broadcasting its first-ever live NBA game around the world. The matchup — Celtics vs. Knicks — was part of an 11-year deal that gives Amazon exclusive rights to select regular season and playoff games.
We watched the game via Prime Video — accessible with a $139/year Prime subscription — and came away impressed.
The stream ran seamlessly across Fire TV, iPhone, and MacBook. The quality was crisp, load times near-instant, and there wasn’t a hint of lag — at least on a home WiFi connection. Amazon’s 1080p HDR video and 5.1 surround sound were a slam dunk.
The broadcast looked and felt like a traditional national telecast.The graphics mirrored what fans expect from ESPN or TNT, the commentary came from familiar voices — Eagle and Stan Van Gundy — and the pregame show from featured a slick set with former NBA stars at Amazon MGM Studios.
Amazon’s pre-game show features a LED court that helps analysts explain basketball dynamics. The show includes (from left) host Taylor Rooks and former NBA stars Steve Nash, Udonis Haslem, Dirk Nowitzki, and Blake Griffin.
But under the surface, Amazon quietly tested a new frontier: in-stream sports betting.
The most noticeable new feature was the FanDuel integration, Amazon’s latest experiment in blending live sports and interactive technology.
Fans watching on Fire TV could log into their FanDuel accounts through Prime Video to view real-time betting information and track wagers directly within the broadcast.
You can’t make actual bets on Prime Video — not yet, at least— but it marks a subtle yet significant shift in how live sports may evolve on streaming platforms.
I was surprised when NBA Commissioner Adam Silver joined the broadcast for a live interview. Sideline reporter Cassidy Hubbarth opened by asking about the scandal.
Silver said he was “deeply disturbed” upon hearing the news.
“There’s nothing more important to the league and its fans than the integrity of the competition,” he said.
Silver also praised Amazon’s coverage: “I should have started [by saying] how excited we are to be on Amazon,” he said. “I guess I wouldn’t have predicted that my first interview on Amazon would be about sports betting.”
The interview underscored how Amazon’s coverage didn’t shy away from real-time news relevance — adding a traditional journalistic layer within a tech-powered broadcast.
It was also a surreal moment: the NBA’s top official discussing a sports betting scandal during the league’s debut on a platform now integrating betting tools into its stream.
Amazon has other new tech-fueled features including advanced NBA stats powered by Amazon Web Services — but I didn’t notice that during Friday’s broadcast.
One of the only stumbles for me came on the Fire TV user experience, which feels clunky compared to mobile or desktop. Navigation wasn’t intuitive, and the remote’s button mapping made simple actions harder than expected.
But overall, the whole experience felt less like a tech demo and more like a finished product.
Amazon.com’s homepage promoted the NBA game.
Amazon’s sports strategy is crystalizing: use live sports to drive Prime signups and boost engagement across its ecosystem. The broadcast was promoted on Amazon’s homepage and apps. Live sports also helps fuel Amazon’s growing advertising business.
Bloomberg reported that Amazon is paying $1.8 billion annually for the NBA rights.
As more people cut the cord, sports leagues are increasingly partnering with tech companies as their existing deals with traditional cable providers expire. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are hungry for valuable content such as live sports to draw more subscribers to their respective platforms.
Amazon also aired the Timberwolves vs. Lakers game on Friday evening. It will stream 66 regular season games this year, along with some playoff games.
The company also separate deals to air the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, WNBA, and Premier League, among other sports-related programming on its Prime Video platform.
The NBA debut on Friday was a reminder of Amazon’s approach to live sports: combine the reliability of broadcast TV with subtle tech layers — such as betting, data, and e-commerce — built on its AWS cloud infrastructure and Prime membership model.
Alaska Airlines already tried to shore up its IT infrastructure after an outage in July forced the Seattle-based company to ground flights across the country.
Apparently, it wasn’t enough.
Alaska was hit with another major outage on Thursday, leading to a ground stop that lasted eight hours and resulted in more than 400 flights canceled across Alaska Airlines and its subsidiary Horizon Air.
In a new update Friday afternoon, the company said more than 49,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted.
The outage was severe enough to postpone the company’s scheduled quarterly earnings call Friday. Shares were down more than 6%.
Alaska said it was still working to normalize operations.
The company has blamed the outage on a failure at its primary data center. It was not due to a cybersecurity incident.
“Following a similar disruption earlier this year, we took action to harden our systems, but this failure underscores the work that remains to be done to ensure system stability,” the company said in its latest update. “We are immediately bringing in outside technical experts to diagnose our entire IT infrastructure to ensure we are as resilient as we need to be. ”
It added: “The reliability of our technology is fundamental to our ability to serve guests and get them to where they need to be.”
Alaska said its July outage was caused by a failure of a “critical piece of hardware” at its data centers.
The airline operates a hybrid infrastructure, blending its own data centers with third-party cloud platforms, according to an interview last year with Vikram Baskaran, Alaska’s vice president of IT.
Alaska began migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure around 2015 and continues to maintain its own data centers for critical workloads, according to the interview.
The company last year partnered with Google Cloud on a generative AI-powered search experience.
The impact of this week’s outage was evident at Sea-Tac Airport on Thursday evening, where long lines wrapped around the concourse and a maze of suitcases piled up in the baggage claim area.
Alaska said Friday it does not have an estimate of the financial impact of the outage. The company’s Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary was not affected.
Alaska said the July outage was expected to reduce earnings by about $0.10 per share, or roughly $12 million.
The company on Thursday reported third quarter revenue of $3.8 billion, up 1.4% year-over-year, while profit dropped 69% to $123 million.
Travelers at Sea-Tac Airport try to find their luggage following a major outage at Alaska Airlines that began Thursday afternoon. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Alaska Airlines is still working to restore operations following a major outage that forced the Seattle-based company to cancel more than 360 flights on Alaska and its subsidiary Horizon Air.
The outage began Thursday around 3:30 p.m. PT. Alaska grounded planes across the U.S. as it addressed what it described as a “significant IT outage.”
In a statement, Alaska said a “failure occurred at our primary data center.” The outage was not a cybersecurity incident, according to the company.
“The IT outage has impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of the ground stop to keep our aircraft in position,” Alaska said. “The safety of our flights was never compromised.”
The ground stop was lifted at 11:30 p.m. PT Thursday, but the company is still actively addressing operational impacts that resulted from the disruption.
The company canceled its planned third quarter earnings call on Friday. “We do not yet have an estimate of the financial impact of the operational disruption on our fourth quarter results,” Alaska said in a regulatory filing. The company reported revenue of $3.8 billion, up 1.4% year-over-year, while profit dropped 69% to $123 million.
The impact of the outage was evident at Sea-Tac Airport on Thursday evening, where long lines wrapped around the concourse and a maze of suitcases piled up in the baggage claim area.
The company’s Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary was not affected.
When Tim Chen tried to break into venture capital six years ago, multiple firms in Seattle turned him down. “Nobody wanted to hire me,” he recalled in an interview with GeekWire. “I was too technical, they said. Too nerdy.”
Chen, a University of Washington graduate and infrastructure engineer who had just sold a startup, decided to launch his own firm.
Six years later, Chen’s investors — known as limited partners, or LPs — line up to give him money before he even opens a pitch deck.
Chen recently raised $41 million for a fourth fund at Essence VC, his venture firm that backs infrastructure startups. His LPs include institutional investors such as Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado and Cendana Capital’s Michael Kim.
TechCrunch described Chen as “one of the most sought-after solo investors,” highlighting how investors preempted the latest fund.
“I had no deck, no memo — I hadn’t even started raising,” Chen told GeekWire. “The LPs just all came in.”
Chen used AngelList to raise $1 million for his first fund in 2019, focusing on developer tools and infrastructure — categories he knew inside out. The experiment quickly snowballed: he raised $5 million for Fund II and $27 million for Fund III.
A dozen companies from the Essence portfolio have been acquired, including Tabular, a data management startup that sold to Databricks last year for a reported $2.2 billion.
What started as rejection has become a calling for Chen — and an unconventional venture capital success story.
After studying computer science at the UW, Chen worked at Microsoft and VMware, helped launch open-source cloud startup Mesosphere, and later founded Hyperpilot, an “AIOps” company acquired by Cloudera.
Chen’s experience as a software engineer and operator has become his edge in VC — especially amid the AI boom. He’s able to make faster decisions and gain respect from founders.
“Tim asked the hardest, most interesting questions about how we were going to build what we said we were going to build,” said Jordan Tigani, CEO of Seattle startup MotherDuck. “From a founder perspective, this let me trust that he actually believed in what we were doing and was coming to his decisions on his own.”
Seattle entrepreneur Patrick Thompson raised capital from Chen twice — with his previous startup Iteratively, which was acquired, and his current company Clarify. “He’s one of the most technically-minded people, but also super humble and easy to work with,” Thompson said.
The combination of engineering depth and empathy has helped Chen win competitive early-stage deals. He’s built a niche around helping technical founders translate research and code into products and go-to-market strategies.
“I’m looking for people that have a deep enough background, with high intensity, and huge flexibility on learning,” he said.
Essence’s portfolio spans across the U.S. and beyond. LPs ask Chen why he hasn’t moved to the Bay Area yet.
Chen is staying in Seattle, where he’s lived since high school. He believes Seattle’s tech scene is under-networked but brimming with talent.
“There’s so much great engineering talent with great iconic companies here,” he said.
Essence plans to make around 40 investments out of its fourth fund. Seattle is certainly on Chen’s radar.
“Of course,” he said. “I’m meeting people here, like UW PhDs. I like technical people. The nerdier, the geekier, the better.”
An Alaska Airlines plane at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Updated at 8:40 p.m. Pacific.
Alaska Airlines said it’s recovering from an IT outage and “actively restoring operations” as of 7 p.m. Thursday after grounding flights across the U.S. for about three hours.
In a statement sent to GeekWire, Alaska said the outage began around 3:30 p.m. PT with a failure at the company’s primary data center.
“The IT outage has impacted several of our key systems that enable us to run various operations, necessitating the implementation of the ground stop to keep our aircraft in position,” the company said. “The safety of our flights was never compromised.”
The outage was not a cybersecurity event or related to other events, according to Alaska.
Flights are resuming but passengers at some airports are facing long delays as they await inbound planes.
During the outage, passengers on Reddit reported that some planes were sitting on the tarmac or de-boarding. Customers also reported issues with the company’s app and website.
It was Alaska’s second outage in three months. The Seattle-based airline grounded flights after an outage in July that lasted about three hours.
Alaska Airlines is experiencing an IT outage affecting operations. A temporary ground stop is in place. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you're scheduled to fly tonight, please check your flight status before heading to the airport.
100 fewer Alaska Airlines aircraft in the air now compared to last week as the airline is experiencing an IT outage this evening. Some flights are now departing, but a delays will be felt for some time to come. pic.twitter.com/zIkJTTETiz
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