Meta to Axe 8,000 Workers Amid AI Drive
Meta circulated a memo to staff yesterday (Thursday) informing them that the company plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce in May. That’s roughly 8,000 jobs. On top of that, Meta says it will not fill the thousands of jobs it was advertising for.
It is no secret that Meta has been pushing hard into artificial intelligence (AI), and the eye-watering sums involved in AI architecture are a key reason for the layoffs.
Meta is expected to spend $135 billion this year, which is as much as the previous three years combined. The splurge spooked jittery investors last year and sent the stock price plummeting.
While the mass redundancies are brutal, they have been expected. The BBC notes that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that he had noticed workers are way more productive when they use AI tools.
“I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta, a company that is no stranger to mass layoffs, has already cut 2,000 jobs this year. But these cuts specifically relate to infrastructure costs of running AI models, and, as The Associated Press notes, the cost of firing AI experts the company hired on big salaries.
“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,” Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, wrote in the memo to staff.
Meta is far from the only tech giant laying off jobs amid the AI revolution: Amazon has said it will cull 16,000 workers because of its AI investments; Microsoft also announced this week that it is offering voluntary buyouts to roughly 8,750 workers; and Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., is cutting 16 percent of its workforce — about 1,000 jobs.
As well as the cuts, Meta also announced this week that it will track and log employees’ interactions with work computers so that data can train its AI models. Workers have described Meta’s actions as “dystopian.”
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
