If the opening weeks of the year are any indication, the tech layoff wave is carrying straight into 2026. Last year saw over 1,23,941 tech employees fired from 269 tech companies, a decline from 1,50,000 job cuts across 549 companies in 2024, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi.
Notably, several major tech companies announced thousands of job cuts in 2025 with AI adoption as a key factor. AI was behind layoffs that led to at least 55,000 people being fired in the United States in 2025, according to a report by consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
2026 is similarly expected to be marked by AI-driven layoffs as corporations increasingly use the technology to write code for their software and adopt AI agents that automate routine tasks in order to ultimately save costs and cut reliance on people. However, some believe that the impact of AI on the labour market will be muted. Instead, they expect to see a huge ramp up in anxiety around the technology in 2026.
Amazon
Last week, news reports suggested that Amazon is planning to axe 30,000 corporate roles in a second round of job cuts. AWS and Prime Video employees as well as staffers from the tech giant’s retail and human resources divisions are expected to be affected, Reuters reported.
It would be the largest layoff in Amazon’s three-decade history since 2022, when the company trimmed about 27,000 jobs. In October 2025, Amazon cut some 14,000 white-collar jobs with a purported target of laying off a total of 30,000 workers. The company is one of the few to directly link the rise of AI to job cuts.
“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” it said in an internal letter last year.
Also Read | Davos delegates stress AI’s employment upside as layoff fears linger
But, more recently, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call that the reduction was “not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven.” Instead, Jassy appeared to suggest that the company has too much bureaucracy.
Story continues below this ad
“You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,” he said. This is in contrast to his earlier 2025 remarks, where he had said that Amazon’s corporate workforce was expected to shrink over time as a result of efficiencies gained from the use of AI.
Meta
Meta was reportedly among the first big tech companies to lay off employees this year. The social media giant plans to cut around 10 per cent of the employees in its Reality Labs division who work on products including the metaverse, as per a report by The New York Times.
Reality Labs has roughly 15,000 employees who work on virtual reality headsets and virtual social networks. The team also produces Meta’s Quest mixed-reality headsets, smart glasses made with EssilorLuxottica’s Ray-Ban and augmented-reality glasses.
The metaverse had been a massive project spearheaded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who prioritised and spent heavily on the venture, only for the business to burn more than $60 billion since 2020.
Story continues below this ad
AI, layoffs talk at Davos
There appears to be no consensus yet about how big a role AI will play in 2026’s tech layoffs. Stating that AI is a major factor for economic growth, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said, “We see potential to up of 0.8% boost to growth over the next years, but it is hitting the labor market like a tsunami, and most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it.
“What do they [countries and companies] have to do? They need to think about the new skills that are already necessary and how they’re going to have these new skills,” Georgieva was quoted as saying by CNBC.
Deutsche Bank analysts, on the other hand, have said that companies attributing much of the blame for job cuts to AI should be taken “with a grain of salt”. “Anxiety about AI will go from a low hum to a loud roar this year. This will be reflected in lawsuits over everything from copyright to privacy, data centre location and protection of young people from chatbots encouraging self-harm or worse,” the note read.
“AI redundancy washing will be a significant feature of 2026,” it added. Sander van’t Noordende, the CEO of Randstad, also believes that the role of AI in job cuts is being overstated.
Story continues below this ad
“I would argue that those 50,000 job losses are not driven by AI, but are just driven by the general uncertainty in the market. It’s too early to link those to AI […] I see AI as a big opportunity for our industry to do a better job for talent. Reaching out to talent. Connecting with talent, evaluating talent, onboarding talents. Lots of those activities can be done by AI,” Noordende was quoted as saying.
Also Read | Tech layoffs in 2025: How AI emerged as a clear(er) driver of job cuts
Even studies about the impact of AI on jobs are not in agreement. Consultancy firm Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report, which surveyed 12,000 people worldwide, found that employee concerns about job loss due to AI have skyrocketed from 28 per cent in 2024 to 40 per cent in 2026.
However, it said that firms will need to upskill workers as three-quarters of investors said they are more likely to invest in companies that provide AI education to employees. Meanwhile, a Stanford study from November 2025 reported a 16 per cent relative decline in employment for graduates in roles exposed to AI, as opposed to jobs for experienced employees remaining stable since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.
India’s Economic Survey 2023-24 had flagged that AI could cast a “huge pall of uncertainty” on workers across skill segments in the country, with those working in more backend operations such as business processing outsourcing (BPO) under the most amount of threat.
