Uber laid off 10% after its best quarter ever. Here's why

Uber just laid off 10% of its workforce while generating its highest quarterly revenue ever: $14.2B.

What Uber's CEO said

Here are the reasons the CEO gave in a blog post:

“Organizational health: We’re spending too much time on cross-team coordination, lengthy debates, and unclear decision-making. To address this, we’ve reduced coordination-focused roles, clarified responsibilities, and broadened manager scopes, particularly where teams had only 1-2 reports. Overall, we’ve reduced employees sitting 7+ layers from the CEO by 20% and cut micro-teams by nearly 50%, creating a simpler organization focused more on building, shipping, and serving customers.”

“Team simplification: We’re bringing together teams where separate structures have created duplication and slowed decisions. Most significantly, the three Delivery Ops teams across Restaurants, Retail, and Direct will become single-threaded teams at global, regional, and country levels, with P&Ls under single owners. In Tech, Core Services Engineering and Science will also be combined, mirroring the structure already used across Mobility and Delivery.”

“Location strategy: We’re concentrating teams in fewer key hubs to improve collaboration and co-location. Global teams will be centered in NY and SF, regional teams in designated regional hubs, and tech teams in tech hubs. Most remote employees will be asked to return to an office, with only ~1% expected to remain remote. The existing hybrid policy will continue.”

Opinion: here's what they're NOT telling you

Uber isn't laying off 3,300 people because the business is falling apart. Its latest quarter showed $14.2B in revenue, up 12%, with gross bookings up 22% and adjusted EBITDA up 33%. Uber is generating serious cash.

So why cut 10% now? Look at where that money is going.

Uber has said it plans to invest more than $10B in autonomous vehicles, while also pursuing its roughly $14.8B Delivery Hero acquisition. At the same time, Uber is spending aggressively on AI.

Uber has also seen its R&D expenses rise 20% in the first half of 2026, while G&A expenses increased 31%. A meaningful part of that increase came from employee compensation and contractors.

Now Uber appears to believe that some of that structure has become unnecessary, and AI makes this even more interesting.

Uber says more than 70% of code-change submissions are now being generated by AI agents, with engineers running more than 30,000 agent tasks every day. That justifies 20% fewer managers and 50% fewer micro-teams.

So underneath all the language about organizational health and simplification, there is a bigger strategy: Take capital and people out of lower-leverage organizational layers and redirect them toward AI, autonomous vehicles, acquisitions and higher-growth parts of the business.

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