Meta is reportedly preparing for its biggest round of layoffs since the ‘year of efficiency’ restructuring in 2022–23, and this time the scale could be staggering. According to a Reuters report, cuts could affect 20% or more of the company’s nearly 79,000-strong workforce—potentially over 15,800 jobs—driven by mounting AI infrastructure costs and a broader push toward leaner, AI-assisted operations.No date has been reportedly being finalised and the exact magnitude remains undecided. But top executives are said to have have already begun signalling the plans to senior leadership, asking them to map out how to pare back, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. One person familiar with the company’s thinking told Business Insider the cuts could come as soon as a month.
Meta’s AI ambitions are costing the company a fortune
The layoffs are driven by two forces: offsetting the enormous cost of Meta’s AI infrastructure bets, and preparing for a smaller, more efficient workforce that AI tools are expected to enable.
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The company has committed $600 billion to build data centres by 2028. Its 2026 capital expenditure is projected to hit as high as $135 billion—nearly double the $72 billion it spent last year.
Beyond infrastructure, Meta has been handing out eye-watering pay packages to court top AI researchers for its superintelligence team. Some of those packages are reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years.It has also been on a buying spree. Meta recently acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents, and is spending at least $2 billion to acquire Chinese AI startup Manus. It also invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI in June last year, bringing on its founder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer.Zuckerberg has been open about where this is heading. In January, he said he was already seeing “projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.”Last week, Meta created a new AI engineering organisation where teams will have manager-to-employee ratios of up to 1:50.
The 20% figure would make this Meta’s worst round of job cuts ever
If the 20% figure holds, it would surpass the twin rounds of cuts in late 2022 and early 2023. Back then, Meta laid off roughly 11,000 employees in November 2022—around 13% of its workforce. About four months later, it announced another 10,000 cuts. In January this year, it had already cut 1,500 people in its Reality Labs division. A 20% reduction today would translate to roughly 15,800 jobs gone.Meta wouldn’t be alone in this. The cuts reflect a pattern of historic job reductions sweeping across big tech. Amazon confirmed one of its largest-ever rounds of layoffs in January, cutting around 16,000 jobs—nearly 10% of its workforce. Fintech firm Block went even further, chopping nearly half its staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly pointing to AI tools as the driving reason.”The company spokesperson Andy Stone stopped short of a denial, calling it “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” in response to Reuters’ questions—suggesting the cuts may have been discussed internally but are far from finalised.
Meta’s AI model troubles are piling up at the worst possible time
The layoff news lands at an already turbulent moment for Meta’s AI ambitions. Its new foundational model, codenamed Avocado, has reportedly fallen short in internal tests for reasoning, coding, and writing—underperforming rivals like Google’s Gemini 3.0—and has been pushed back to at least May from its original March target.Before Avocado, Meta scrapped the largest version of its Llama 4 model, called Behemoth, which had been due out last summer after facing criticism for delivering misleading benchmark results.The company assembled an elite internal unit called TBD Lab, led by Wang, specifically to build Avocado—but so far, the lab’s only public release has been Vibes, an AI video app. With Avocado delayed, billions committed, and now potentially thousands of jobs on the line, the stakes for that team have never been higher.
