Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers, according to a Reuters report.
However, no date has been set for these cuts, and the magnitude has not been finalised, Reuters was told by sources.
Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, anonymous sources told Reuters.
“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to questions about the plan.
Most significant job cut at Meta
Meta employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest filing.
If Meta settles on the 20% figure, this layoff may affect nearly 16,000 employees, making it the most significant job cut at Mark Zuckerberg’s company since its restructuring in the “year of efficiency” — late 2022 and early 2023.
Meta laid off 11,000 staffers in November 2022, around 13% of its workforce at the time. Around four months later, it announced it was cutting another 10,000 jobs.
Focus on generative AI
Over the last year, CEO Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more forcefully in generative AI. The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to court top AI researchers to a new superintelligence team.
The company has said it plans to invest $600 billion to build data centres by 2028.
Earlier this week, it acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents. Meta is also spending at least $2 billion to buy a Chinese AI startup – .
Zuckerberg has alluded to efficiency gains from the investments, saying in January he was starting to see “projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.”
Meta’s planned AI investments follow a series of setbacks with its Llama 4 models last year, including criticism that it provided misleading results on the benchmarks it used for early versions. It abandoned the release of the largest version of that model, called Behemoth, which had been due out in the summer.
Meta’s superintelligence team has been working to reassert the company’s standing this year by building a new model called Avocado, but the performance of that model has also lagged expectations. Its release has also been pushed to later.
AI-led job cuts this year
Meta’s layoff plans reflect a broader pattern among major US companies, particularly in tech, this year. Executives have pointed to recent improvements in AI systems as one reason for the changes.
In January, confirmed it would cut some 16,000 jobs, amounting to nearly 10% of its workforce.
Last month, the fintech company Block chopped nearly half of its staff, with CEO explicitly pointing to AI tools and their growing capability to help companies do more with smaller teams.
(With Reuters inputs)