Meta has confirmed that the company's plan to eliminate one in ten jobs will commence this week, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg channels billions of dollars into artificial intelligence in an effort to reshape the company around this rapidly advancing technology.
Approximately 11,000 employees are expected to be affected, though some reports suggest the total could eventually rise to as many as 21,000 positions. Meta confirmed to CNBC that the layoffs will begin on Wednesday.
The cuts were first reported in April, when an internal memo revealed the company intended to reduce its workforce by 10 percent. Zuckerberg previously acknowledged that Meta over-hired during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the company now accelerates spending on AI and data center construction. Meta is projected to spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditures in 2026.
"I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," Zuckerberg told staff in a November memo during a period when the company's stock was declining. Meta is also abandoning plans to hire for approximately 6,000 currently open roles, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg.
This move represents one of the most significant shake-ups at Meta since its aggressive "year of efficiency" campaign in 2022 and 2023, when the tech giant cut 21,000 jobs. The latest downsizing follows about 1,000 layoffs in January within Meta's Reality Labs division, along with additional cuts in March that affected hundreds more employees. The company has also moved away from using third-party vendors and contractors for content moderation work.
The contrast is stark: during the earlier layoffs, Meta was struggling financially. Now, the company is highly profitable, generating more than $60 billion in profit last year on over $200 billion in revenue—yet it is still shrinking its workforce. Instead, Zuckerberg is funneling hundreds of billions into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Meta currently operates 31 data centers worldwide, housing the server capacity needed to process and store the billions of messages, posts, and images shared every second across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. In June 2025, the company invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, a software company that was poached by Meta along with its CEO Alexandr Wang.
Meta revealed in its fourth-quarter earnings report in January that it expects to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion on AI this year. When combined with planned investments from Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, total AI spending by the four tech giants could reach around $700 billion.
Meta is not alone in linking artificial intelligence to layoffs. Cloudflare had over 1,000 employees laid off following a memo from co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn that warned staff that AI had completely transformed how the company operates, despite the company boasting impressive first-quarter revenue of $639.8 million. Oracle, the software and cloud computing powerhouse founded by billionaire Larry Ellison, started cutting staff in April in what insiders described as a "significant reduction in force." Workers said they were informed via early morning emails before quickly losing access to company systems. Leading tech companies Amazon and Block have all announced job cuts while pointing in some way to AI, automation, or efforts to make workers more productive.
