With technology layoffs no longer confined to struggling firms or niche business units, a worrying global trend has emerged: market leaders with strong revenues are now at the forefront of these global layoffs. Here, Amazon appears to be leading the way in axing jobs,
Large technology firms are actively reshaping their workforces as they pivot towards automation, AI-driven efficiency, and leaner operating models. To shed light on the true scale of this shift, a new report from the company RationalFX demonstrates the scale of global tech industry layoffs in 2026.
The leaders letting staff go
Mounting warnings from business leaders and economists point to artificial intelligence as a key accelerator of these layoff waves, with companies restructuring around automation, machine learning, and efficiency gains putting not only individual roles but entire job functions at risk.
To determine which companies led 2026’s biggest job cuts, the firm compiled layoff data from multiple verified sources, including U.S. WARN notices, TrueUp, TechCrunch, and the Layoffs.fyi tracker.
Data shows that more than half of the 30,700 tech layoffs worldwide since the start of the year have come from a single company: Amazon.
The US tech giant announced 16,000 cuts in early 2026, following 14,000 roles shed in October 2025. That earlier round made Amazon the second-largest contributor to global tech layoffs in 2025, with a total of 19,555, just behind Nvidia’s massive 33,900 job cuts.
Companies With the Most Tech Layoffs So Far in 2026
- Amazon – 16,000 layoffs
- ams OSRAM – 2,000 layoffs
- Ericsson – 1,900 layoffs
- ASML – 1,700 layoffs
- Meta – 1,500 layoffs
- Block – 1,100 layoffs
- Autodesk – 1,000 layoffs
- Salesforce – 1,000 layoffs
- Ocado – 1,000 layoffs
- Pinterest – 677 layoffs
Amazon’s late January 2026 announcement that it would be laying off 16,000 people has pushed global layoff counts past 30,700 in less than two months since the start of the year, meaning that more than 52% of total tech layoffs worldwide occurred at a single company. These layoffs occurred despite Amazon posting record revenues of $716.9 billion in 2025 (up 12% year-on-year).
A similar pattern is emerging in Europe, where German-Austrian lighting and semiconductor group ams Osram recently announced plans to cut around 2,000 roles globally, even as the company reported a sharp improvement in its financial performance and narrowing losses, further proving that tech layoffs in 2026 are being driven by strategic restructuring rather than financial distress.
In 2025, roughly 69,840 of the 245,000 tech layoffs, about 28.5% of the total, were tied to AI adoption and automation. That pattern has carried into 2026, with at least 1,430 confirmed AI-related job cuts so far, including Pinterest’s 15% workforce reduction (675 layoffs) as part of a strategic pivot toward AI.
Another growing trend is how these job cuts mainly target corporate, product, and ‘support layer’ roles. Companies such as Block, Autodesk, Ocado, and Pinterest are trimming management layers, go-to-market teams, and overlapping product functions as they consolidate around fewer, higher-return priorities, indicating that these early 2026 layoffs are driven more by operational tightening than by cost-cutting or automation.
Large-scale layoffs, once considered a red flag by investors, have become a standard tool for operational refinement among leading tech firms. Amazon’s massive layoff waves clearly illustrate this shift: even as the company posts record revenues and pours billions into AI infrastructure, it is flattening management layers and eliminating entire job functions.
Source – https://www.digitaljournal.com/business/tech-layoffs-big-tech-is-now-leading-the-way/article