Amazon will report earnings after the closing bell on Thursday. Analysts want updates on AI progress, AWS, and retail margins.

The AI-related layoffs at Amazon and some other firms reflect a "hollowing out of middle-skilled workers," Lynn Wu, a professor of operations, information and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania, told ABC News.

Amazon has faced pressure from investors to tighten its finances as it spends big on the AI race. The company says it will cut 14,000 jobs, citing a goal of "reducing bureaucracy, removing layers."

Amazon said in a press release Wednesday that Anthropic is using 500,000 of its Trainium2 chips for its Claude AI models as part of the tech giant's Project Rainier, a massive AI

Amazon has confirmed it will cut 14,000 corporate jobs as part of a strategic shift towards artificial intelligence.

Amazon said it will cut approximately 14,000 white-collar jobs as it seeks to gain efficiencies -- and as it prepares for advances in artificial intelligence in running the company.

Amazon.com said on Wednesday it has launched its compute cluster project called Rainier, and added that artificial intelligence firm Anthropic will use more than a million chips of the infrastructure by the end of the year.

Amazon’s biggest AI data center is now operational in Indiana, with half a million AWS Trainium2 chips entirely devoted to powering OpenAI rival Anthropic. Just over a year ago, it was nothing but cornfields.