Amazon's Auckland office in the PwC Tower at Commercial Bay, downtown Auckland - home to most of its 150 local AWS staff. Photo / Chris Keall
Amazon's Auckland office in the PwC Tower at Commercial Bay, downtown Auckland - home to most of its 150 local AWS staff. Photo / Chris Keall
Amazon New Zealand staff have been called to a midday meeting, where they expect to hear how they will be impacted by the multinational’s latest round of layoffs.
Last month, Amazon revealed it was preparing to cut 9000 workers, adding to the 18,000 layoffs announced in January, as a downturnin consumer spending forces the e-commerce and cloud computing giant into a retrenchment.
The company employs more than 1.5 million staff worldwide, mostly warehouse and fulfilment workers. Amazon’s recent job cuts have targeted better-paid corporate roles in an effort to reshape its back-office operations.
The Financial Times has reported the majority of the new cuts will come at the company’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services (or AWS, the main focus of the firm’s local operation), the video-game streaming platform Twitch, and its human resources and advertising departments.
In mid-2021, the firm said its Auckland-based local AWS operation had hired 50 staff over the past year, taking its total complement to more than 100 - with most based in the new PwC Tower at Commercial Bay. AWS NZ has 150 staff today, a spokeswoman told the Herald this morning.
The Amazon spokeswoman would not say how many local positions are under consultation (and an email invite to the midday meeting was in BCC: format, so staff could not see who else was invited).
A hyperscale data centre under construction in Westgate, northwest Auckland, which has Microsoft and DCI's names on related Overseas Investment Office applications. DCI - which is also building a hyperscale data centre in Albany - said the first stage of its first NZ operations went live last week. Photo / Chris Keall
The spokeswoman did point the Herald to a blog post by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on “role eliminations” In the post, Jassy talks about the need for a “leaner operation” in the face of “economic uncertainty”.
She also offered a general comment: “The role reductions in AWS are driven by re-prioritisation decisions, which required us to reallocate resources. In most cases this involved people shifting projects, priorities, or teams, but in some cases we didn’t have the right skill match for these priorities. We continue to be very excited and optimistic about our AWS business, which continues to have very strong pipeline, migration and fundamentals, even in a challenging economic environment.”
The firm is in the process of creating its first “AWS Region” or twin “hyperscale” datacentres in Auckland’s northwest, with the first servers due to come online by the end of this year.
Amazon won’t comment on details, including the location of the server farms, but the Herald understands that AWS (and Microsoft, which has also refused to comment on locations) will be among the tech giants who are anchor tenants for the facilities being constructed by data centre builder and operator DCI on a 5.8-hectare site in Albany on Auckland’s North Shore, which will host some 80,000 servers and a smaller facility at Westgate in the city’s northwest (the first stage of which opened last week). DCI is owned by Canada’s Brookfield.
Amazon earlier said that its Auckland data centre builds would create 1000 jobs.
The Amazon spokeswoman said this morning: “In New Zealand, AWS continues to be fully committed to its $7.5 billion investment to open an AWS Region in Auckland in 2024, bringing world-class cloud computing services to Aotearoa. Our AWS Region will enable developers, start-ups and enterprises as well as government, education, and non-profit organisations to run their applications and serve customers with low latency from data centres located right here in New Zealand.”
The tech downturn has seen tech giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Netflix, SAP and Salesforce lay off around 150,000 staff. Locally, Wellington-based Xero recently announced plans to cull around 15 per cent of its staff, with a further round of cuts possible in June. MYOB and Cin7 have also let staff go, while Sky TV offshored 170 technology, content and helpdesk roles.
