- September 2025: US imposes additional 100k USD per visa as a condition to eligibility. (previous was 5k - 20k USD)

- October 2025: Amazon cuts 14k jobs

- December 2025: Amazon announces additional 35b USD investment to India (total 75b USB by 2030); promises to create ~1m jobs there

- December 2025: Random H1B lottery is dismantled, giving preference to higher company salary spending e.g. the more salary H1B applicant would receive, the better the chances

- January 2026: Amazon cuts 16k additional jobs (30k jobs cut in total)

You really don't have to be a detective to figure out that this has nothing to do with AI.

▲ reliabilityguy 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can you explain in more details how changing h1b rules leads to layoffs?

	▲	not_jassy 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'll take a stab: Higher cost h1b employees incentives offshoring where average employee cost is reduced. Less h1b employees incentives offshoring. Offshoring.
	▲	rvz 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's actually both. `1. Ramp up offshore hiring and relocate jobs in low-cost-of-living (LCOL) countries (India) to avoid paying the 100K H1-B visa charge. 2. Train their AI and robotics by researchers in LCOL countries (to eventually replace the high-cost-of-living (HCOL) warehouse labor workforce) 3. Deploy robots and AI agents to then layoff more people in HCOL environments and repeat (1) until their margins improve and they achieve AGI.` It's not that hard to see.

▲ 33MHz-i486 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

except they planned the January layoff in October or even earlier over the summer.

▲ ihsw 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]