Amazon is eliminating hundreds of jobs in its streaming and theatrical film operations, adding to the more than 25,000 layoffs it's had over the past two years as the company reduced its office footprint and canceled or postponed expansion projects across the United States.
The Seattle-based e-commerce giant announced in an email to employees that it eliminated “several hundred” jobs in its Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios divisions. In addition, Twitch — Amazon’s San Francisco-based livestreaming platform popular with gamers — plans to cut more than 500 jobs, or a third of its staff, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said in a company blog post.
"We've identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact," Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, told employees in an internal note provided to CoStar News by an Amazon spokesperson.
Technology led all other sectors in the number of announced job cuts last year, according to the latest tracking data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Technology layoffs more than doubled the previous-year figure for the first 11 months of 2023 Amazon and other major firms such as Microsoft and the parent firms of Facebook and Google cut jobs, according to Challenger.
Real Estate Impact
As it cut costs and laid off workers, Amazon shed hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space last year. The company also halted construction at its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, which it dubbed HQ2, and some office towers in greater Seattle and Nashville, Tennessee.
The company said it wouldn’t renew its leases for space in towers near its corporate headquarters in downtown Seattle, including more than 200,000 square feet at 1800 Ninth and more than 400,000 square feet at West 8th in Denny Triangle.
Amazon is shifting thousands of employees based in those buildings to other local offices, including downtown Bellevue, Washington, where the company recently opened offices in the 555 Tower and at West Main.
The company did not address which specific offices would be affected by the latest layoffs. Prime Video has offices in Seattle.
Amazon MGM Studios, formerly Amazon Studios, in based near Los Angeles in Culver City, California. Amazon leases space in the Culver Steps office park and most of the roughly 720,000-square-foot Culver Studios, both owned by Hackman Capital Partners.
In greater Seattle, the moves by Amazon and other companies have contributed to the most pronounced office downtown in more than 40 years, according to CoStar Market Analytics.
The amount of occupied office space in the region fell by about 4 million square feet in 2023, the largest single-year decline on record, CoStar data shows.