Meta shifts headcount to AI
- Meta plans major job cuts to shift spending from staff to AI infrastructure. - Reports say about 8,000 roles, roughly 10% of the workforce, will be cut starting May 20. - The move signals platform economics changing as compute replaces labor, with broad ad and tooling impacts. (foxbusiness.com)
Meta is preparing to cut about 8,000 jobs starting May 20 as it shifts spending toward artificial intelligence infrastructure, according to Reuters. (foxbusiness.com) Reuters reported the first round would equal roughly 10% of Meta’s workforce, with additional cuts possible later in 2026. Fox Business, citing the Reuters report, said the company has not publicly confirmed the broader plan. (foxbusiness.com) Meta ended 2025 with 74,067 employees, according to its annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A cut of about 8,000 roles would be a little over one in 10 jobs at that year-end headcount. (sec.gov) The spending pressure comes from data centers and the specialized chips that train and run artificial intelligence systems. Meta told investors in January that 2026 capital expenditures would be $115 billion to $135 billion, up sharply as it builds more computing capacity. (sec.gov) Meta has already tied that buildout to specific projects. In March, the company said it was raising the cost of a new El Paso, Texas, data center to $10 billion, with a target of 1 gigawatt of capacity by 2028. (cnbc.com) Investors have largely accepted the higher spending as long as Meta’s advertising business keeps growing. After Meta’s January earnings report, CNBC said Wall Street gave Mark Zuckerberg “the green light” to keep investing heavily in artificial intelligence after strong revenue growth. (cnbc.com) The workforce cuts also fit a longer reset inside Meta. The company eliminated about 21,000 jobs in 2022 and 2023 during Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency,” after hiring aggressively during the pandemic. (reuters.com) This time, the logic is less about undoing overhiring than reallocating cash from labor to compute. Reuters reported in March that Meta was considering cuts affecting 20% or more of staff as artificial intelligence costs mounted and the company planned for more work to be done with AI-assisted employees. (cnbc.com) The immediate question is whether the May cuts stay near 10% or expand into the deeper reductions Reuters described earlier this year. Either way, Meta is signaling that in 2026, servers and chips are getting a larger share of the budget than payroll. (foxbusiness.com)
