Social media and technology conglomerate Meta is set to slash thousands of positions from its global workforce next month, as the company redirects massive financial resources toward its accelerated artificial intelligence development agenda. In an internal memo distributed to employees on Thursday, company leadership confirmed that the restructuring will eliminate approximately 10% of its current staff, equal to roughly 8,000 roles. In addition to the immediate layoffs, Meta will also scrap plans to fill thousands of additional open positions that were already posted as part of earlier hiring pipelines, according to the document.
The primary driver behind the sweeping job cuts is a historic reallocation of corporate spending toward AI research and product development. Meta has projected that it will spend a total of $135 billion (equivalent to roughly £100 billion) on AI initiatives alone in 2026. Multiple sources familiar with the memo’s content confirm this annual spending figure matches the total amount Meta invested in AI over the entire previous three-year period combined. A Meta spokesperson officially confirmed the planned layoffs in a statement to media, but declined to offer additional commentary beyond the details included in the internal employee memo.
The upcoming cuts do not come as a complete surprise to industry observers or Meta staff. In public remarks made back in January, Meta co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg already signaled that another round of workforce reduction would be coming in 2026. Zuckerberg emphasized in those comments that AI tools have dramatically boosted productivity for teams that integrate the technology heavily into their workflows, noting that a single employee can now deliver on complex projects that would have required an entire large team just a few years ago. “I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” Zuckerberg said in January.
Last week, Reuters first reported that Meta was preparing to cut more than 10,000 jobs across the organization in 2026. Thursday’s internal memo was first reported to the public by Bloomberg News. Even before the official announcement, Meta employees had been anticipating deep cuts for weeks: the company has already eliminated around 2,000 positions in two smaller, earlier layoff rounds this year, and the BBC had previously reported widespread anxiety among staff over further restructuring.
Over the past several months, Meta’s strategic focus and budget priorities have shifted sharply toward accelerating the development of competitive generative AI models and workplace tools, as the company races to keep up with rivals in the fast-growing global AI sector. In a related move that has sparked internal backlash, Meta notified employees just this week that it will begin tracking and logging all employee interactions with work-issued computers, with the collected data intended to be used to train and refine the company’s internal AI models. One anonymous Meta employee described the surveillance policy as “dystopian,” particularly coming at the same time that thousands of workers are facing imminent layoffs. “This company has become obsessed with AI,” the employee told the BBC.
This upcoming round of layoffs is the latest in a series of workforce reductions that Meta has carried out since 2022. Across multiple restructuring rounds over the past three years, the company has already cut tens of thousands of positions from its payroll. After the initial 2022 and 2023 layoffs, Meta resumed hiring through 2025, and by the end of last year, the company’s total headcount was roughly back to the level it stood at before the first round of cuts. The upcoming cuts, when finalized next month, will be Meta’s largest single layoff since the major 2023 restructuring, underscoring the severity of the company’s strategic pivot toward AI.