Meta (NASDAQ: META) plans to lay off 10% of its global workforce—around 8,000 employees—in addition to eliminating 6,000 unfilled positions, as the tech giant continues to refocus on artificial intelligence (AI) development, according to a report from the New York Times.
The planned cuts were reportedly outlined in an internal memo from Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, who said the job losses were a necessary trade-off to fund the company’s broader strategic ambitions, namely in AI.
“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Gale wrote in the memo to employees seen by the New York Times. “This is not an easy trade-off, and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.”
Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, employed more than 78,000 people at the end of 2025, a year that saw revenue surge to $59.89 billion in the fourth quarter, a 24% increase from 2024.
The announcement of staff layoffs comes after the company spent $72.2 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, including costs related to data centers and other AI infrastructure, a figure expected to almost double in 2026.
“We anticipate 2026 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $115-135 billion, with year-over-year growth driven by increased investment to support our Meta Superintelligence Labs efforts and core business,” the company said in its January report on financial results for 2025.
Meta Superintelligence Labs is the tech giant’s AI division, an area in which it has increasingly poured resources over the past few years for AI development and infrastructure.
In July 2025, Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, joined Meta to be the Chief Scientist at its Superintelligence Labs. More recently, this April, the Financial Times revealed that the $1.6 trillion company was funneling resources into building photorealistic, AI-powered 3D characters that users can interact with in real time.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg himself has been bullish on AI’s potential for some time. In an interview with Joe Rogan in January 2025, the Meta CEO said that AI will replace mid-level engineers by 2025.
This shift toward AI, at the expense of the workforce, is mirrored by broader trends in the tech space.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said last week that it was offering buyouts to 7% of its workforce—around 8,750 workers—while, in February, Block, the payments company founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey which is behind payments firms Square and Cash App, announced it was laying off 40% of its staff because “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.”
According to the New York Times report on Thursday, the U.S. employees affected by Meta’s substantial layoffs will be notified on May 20 and will receive severance packages, including 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for each year of service.
A spokesman for Meta reportedly confirmed the cuts but declined comment further.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/meta-to-lay-off-8000-employees-as-it-intensifies-ai-focus/
