Meta: Cuts and Graviton Push
- Meta told employees on April 23 it will cut about 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, starting May 20, and cancel plans to fill 6,000 open roles. - A day later, Amazon Web Services said Meta signed a multiyear deal to deploy AWS Graviton chips at scale, starting with tens of millions of processor cores for AI workloads. - The moves land as Meta projects $115 billion to $135 billion in 2026 capital spending, with infrastructure driving most of the increase. (aboutamazon.com) (investor.atmeta.com)
Meta is cutting about 8,000 jobs even as it expands the hardware behind its artificial intelligence push. (cnbc.com) The layoffs amount to 10% of Meta’s workforce and begin May 20, according to a company memo reported Thursday. Meta is also scrapping plans to hire for 6,000 open roles. (cnbc.com) (bloomberg.com) On April 24, Amazon Web Services said Meta signed a multiyear agreement to deploy AWS Graviton processors at scale. The rollout starts with tens of millions of Graviton cores and can expand. (aboutamazon.com) Graviton is a central processing unit, or CPU, built for general computing work. Amazon said Meta will use the chips for “agentic” AI jobs such as real-time reasoning, code generation, search and coordinating multi-step tasks. (aboutamazon.com) (techcrunch.com) That is a different part of the AI stack from the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that train large models. Amazon and TechCrunch both described the Meta deal as a bet that serving AI tools can require huge volumes of CPU capacity alongside GPUs. (aboutamazon.com) (techcrunch.com) Reuters reported the AWS agreement spans multiple years and is worth billions of dollars. CNBC reported Meta will adopt hundreds of thousands of AWS Graviton chips under the deal. (money.usnews.com) (cnbc.com) Meta has already told investors its spending is headed sharply higher. In February, the company said it expects 2026 capital expenditures of $115 billion to $135 billion, up from $72.22 billion in 2025. (investor.atmeta.com) Meta said most of its 2026 expense growth will come from infrastructure, including third-party cloud spending and higher operating costs for that infrastructure. (investor.atmeta.com) (investing.com) The company’s workforce had already fallen to 78,865 employees at the end of 2025 from 86,482 at the end of 2022, after earlier rounds of cuts tied to efficiency and changing priorities. (cnbc.com) Taken together, the two announcements point to a narrower payroll and a larger compute bill. Meta is cutting people in April 2026 while buying more cloud chips to run the AI systems it wants to scale. (cnbc.com) (aboutamazon.com)
