I realize it’s easy to pattern-match this news to 'hiring in India vs. firing in US' given the current climate, but having worked at Amazon India for 4 years, I can tell you the cuts happen there too.

Amazon has a history of annual restructuring that hits every region. It isn't necessarily a direct relocation strategy so much as their standard operational churn. The 'efficiency' cuts are happening globally, India included.

People may have forgotten what happened back in early 2000s. Outsourcing was all the rage, and people in the US were really concerned. And then it came the explosive growth of internet, of mobile, of cloud, of social network, and etc. And then discussion died or at least dwindled enough that we stopped paying attention.

It looks to me that massive outsource means that companies turn to focus on incremental improvements, which won't require rapid communication in the same location. Besides, the tech has been growing amazingly for decades, other countries have caught up and therefore have growing number of talent. It's a matter of time for them to own more R&D.

Amazon is a big retailer in India, believe it or not, if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.

Based on what Amazon team you are in more than half are born in India. Makes sense they’d be moving operations there.

AI = actually Indians

It was pretty obvious what is going to follow axing of H1B

Where are you seeing “American” jobs? Amazon workers in India were laid off too.

There are similar stories about Amazon investing in American cities too. Cherry picking a story that Amazon is renovating their office in India is ingenuine.

Just Walk Out was actually 1000 people in India. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...

This is a nicer way to say to say layoffs/outsourcing while being rewarded by the market for "adopting AI".

I wonder how this is also related to the attacks on the H1B visa.

This is and always has been an eventuality. It's like fighting inertia or gravity to think otherwise. When the pay disparity is so massive, what is the incentive to hire US talent?

I say that as an American that is concerned with our local economies and employment but that's not looking through rose colored glasses.

As is the case with many mass layoffs. AI just makes a good reason to claim. It makes you look progressive to investors and it doesn't make you look bad to the public. If AI didn't exist it would be some other excuse to spin this as a positive for the company and not bad for the affected workers.

Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath.

I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just selling a good or service.

For who does not know, in tech Amazon has always been the biggest H1B shop.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2025/11/17/top-u...

Maybe the support scammers can get some real jobs as prompt engineers? Hey I'm trying to find some upside around all this.