So… the tech industry just had its roughest year in recent memory.
Over a hundred thousand jobs, gone. From Amazon to Intel, Meta to Google — pink slips are flying faster than AI chatbots can write press releases.
According to Layoffs.fyi, 218 tech companies trimmed their teams in 2025, cutting more than 112,000 jobs. That’s not a typo. And it’s not just scrappy startups tightening their belts — it’s the giants. The same companies that once bragged about record hiring during the pandemic.
So what’s going on?
Simple answer: AI, money, and momentum.
Let’s unpack the chaos.
Amazon at the top is swinging the axe hard — up to 14,000 corporate roles gone, which is nearly 4% of its white-collar workforce.
The official line is “efficiency,” but insiders say it’s really about AI. CEO Andy Jassy wants to “run Amazon like the world’s largest startup,” which is corporate-speak for cut middle management, pour billions into machine learning, and let algorithms take over the grunt work.
Intel, once the king of chips, is chopping 24,000 jobs, almost a quarter of its entire staff.
The company’s scrambling to catch up to Nvidia and AMD, but in the AI era, that means spending billions on hardware — and saving billions by not paying people. Intel’s U.S. and European offices have been hit the hardest, with layoffs stretching from California to Poland.
Then there’s TCS, India’s largest IT exporter, which made history in the worst way: nearly 20,000 roles gone this year. The reason? AI automation.
Mid-level consulting and testing jobs that once relied on human expertise are now handled by software. Their HR chief called it a “skill mismatch.” Everyone else calls it what it is — the AI squeeze.
And they’re not alone. Accenture cut thousands. Microsoft dropped 9,000 this year alone, (mostly engineers). Even Salesforce, once the poster child for cushy tech jobs, laid off 4,000 support staff after Marc Benioff admitted that AI now handles half of all customer conversations. (I mean half!)
Google did its usual quiet rounds — hundreds here, a few thousand there — across Cloud, Pixel, and Android divisions, with one clear message: every team must “reallocate resources toward AI.”
Meta wasn’t far behind. Around 600 employees from its own AI team were cut — if you ask me that’s irony level 10. Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang concluded that leaner teams will make “faster decisions,” which sounds a lot like fewer people, fewer arguments.
Even Oracle, Cisco, and PwC joined the wave, trimming thousands as they shift focus to cloud and AI operations. And just when we thought the bloodbath was over, UPS dropped the mic with 48,000 layoffs.
Now, UPS isn’t exactly a tech company — more like tech-adjacent — but with automation and AI-driven logistics reshaping how deliveries run, they got caught in the crossfire.
When you zoom out, this is more than a rough patch. It’s a recalibration of the entire workforce. After years of “hire now, figure it out later,” companies are realizing they can do more with less —we're talking: fewer middle managers, fewer human bottlenecks, and more automated decision systems.
And here’s the twist — many of these layoffs aren’t happening because companies are struggling. They’re happening because AI is working. It’s boosting efficiency, streamlining code, optimizing customer support, and predicting demand.
But here’s the thing — AI isn’t just deleting jobs; it’s reshaping them.
The next wave of hiring won’t be for the same roles that disappeared. It’ll be for entirely new ones: prompt engineers, model auditors, AI ethicists, robotic workflow designers. Sounds futuristic, but so did “social media manager” fifteen years ago.
So what we’re seeing now isn’t the end of the tech workforce — it’s a hard reboot. And like any good reboot, it’s messy, dramatic, and chaotic.
If 2023 was the AI hype year, then 2025 is the AI consequence year.
And the scoreboard? Humans: down 100,000. Machines: gaining fast.
Stick around — the next few months will define how this story unfolds. Whether AI becomes our productivity partner or our pink-slip printer remains to be seen.
You can find more details here
