Meta is weighing layoffs that could eliminate 20% or more of its global workforce — roughly 15,800 jobs out of 79,000 — as the company looks for ways to finance an AI infrastructure buildout that is becoming one of the most expensive bets in corporate history, according to a Reuters report published Friday.
The potential cuts would be Meta’s deepest since 2022, when it shed 11,000 workers in November and followed up with another 10,000 the following March during what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the “year of efficiency.” This time, the stated driver is not a slowdown in advertising revenue but a capital spending trajectory that has taken on a life of its own. Meta has committed to spending up to $600 billion on data centers by 2028 and is expected to pour between $40 billion and $50 billion into AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.
To fill out its new superintelligence team, Meta has been offering compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years to recruit top AI researchers away from rivals. The company also recently acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents, and is spending at least $2 billion to buy Chinese AI startup Manus. Each of these moves adds to a cost structure that traditional headcount, the argument goes, can no longer justify.
Meta Dismisses Layoff Reports as “Speculative”
Senior executives have reportedly briefed other leaders on the layoff plans and asked them to start planning for significant team reductions, though no final timeline or exact percentage has been set. A Meta spokesperson dismissed the Reuters report as “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” the same language companies often deploy when plans are real but not yet signed off.
Meta is not alone. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs in January, fintech firm Block eliminated nearly 4,000 positions in early March, and Atlassian trimmed 1,600 roles on March 12, each citing AI efficiency gains as the rationale. But the trend has attracted pushback. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and several industry analysts have publicly questioned whether these are genuine AI-driven restructurings or “AI-washing” — using the technology as convenient cover for undoing pandemic-era over-hiring that executives are reluctant to own directly.
For Meta, the calculus is more straightforward than the AI-washing debate suggests. The company’s Llama model series hit performance setbacks last year, and its follow-up model, internally called Avocado, has been delayed due to quality issues. Despite those stumbles, Zuckerberg has publicly framed AI as the company’s defining priority, and the infrastructure required to compete with Google and OpenAI carries costs that have outrun what the existing payroll math can absorb.
Whether the 20% figure holds or gets revised downward, Meta’s next round of layoffs will be the clearest signal yet of what it actually costs a legacy social media company to reposition itself as an AI infrastructure player.