Meta is preparing workforce reductions that could eliminate one-fifth of its employees as the company grapples with ballooning artificial intelligence expenses and anticipates efficiency gains from AI-assisted work.
The social media giant is considering cuts affecting 20% or more of its nearly 79,000-person workforce, according to three sources familiar with internal discussions who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to disclose the plans. No date has been set for the reductions and their exact scale remains undecided.
Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and instructed them to begin planning how to pare back operations, two of the people said. The potential cuts would represent Meta's most significant workforce reduction since its "year of efficiency" restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023.
"Speculative reporting about theoretical approaches."
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone called the reporting that when asked about the plan. The planned reductions come as Meta commits unprecedented resources to artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company has said it plans to invest $600 billion to build data centers by 2028 and is spending at least $2 billion to acquire Chinese AI startup Manus.
Earlier this week, Meta acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more forcefully in generative AI over the past year, offering huge pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years to court top researchers for a new superintelligence team.
Zuckerberg alluded to efficiency gains from these investments in January, saying he was starting to see "projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person."
If implemented at the 20% level, the cuts would exceed Meta's previous major layoffs. The company eliminated 11,000 positions in November 2022 (about 13% of its workforce at the time) and announced another 10,000 job cuts four months later.
Meta's plans reflect a broader pattern among major U.S. technology companies this year as executives point to recent improvements in AI systems as justification for workforce reductions.
In January, Amazon confirmed it would cut approximately 16,000 jobs, nearly 10% of its workforce. Last month, fintech company Block eliminated nearly half its staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly citing AI tools' growing capability to help companies accomplish more with smaller teams.
The planned workforce reductions follow setbacks with Meta's Llama 4 models last year, including criticism over misleading benchmark results and the delay or abandonment of Behemoth, the largest version originally scheduled for summer release. The superintelligence team has been working this year on a new model called Avocado, but its performance has reportedly lagged expectations.
