CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing Meta to compete aggressively in generative AI, offering high-value compensation to top researchers, acquiring startups like Moltbook and Manus, and investing $600 billion in data centers by 2028
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ANNEGRET HILSE
Meta
is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or
more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told
Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence
infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought
about by AI-assisted workers.
No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not
been finalized, the people said.
Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other
senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to
pare back, two of the people said. The sources spoke anonymously
because they were not authorized to disclose the cuts.
Meta did not immediately comment.
If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the
company’s most significant since a restructuring in late 2022
and early 2023 that it dubbed the “year of efficiency.” It
employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to
its latest filing.
The company laid off 11,000 staffers in November 2022, or around
13% of its workforce at the time. Around four months later, it
announced it was cutting another 10,000 jobs.
ZUCKERBERG FOCUSING ON GENERATIVE AI
Over the last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing
Meta to compete more forcefully in generative AI. The company
has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions
of dollars over four years, to court top AI researchers to a new
superintelligence team.
The company has said it plans to invest $600 billion to build
data centers by 2028. Earlier this week, it acquired Moltbook, a
social networking platform built for AI agents. Meta is also
spending at least $2 billion to buy Chinese AI startup Manus,
Reuters previously reported.
Zuckerberg has alluded to efficiency gains from the
investments, saying in January he was starting to see “projects
that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single
very talented person.”
Meta’s plans reflect a broader pattern among major U.S.
companies, particularly in tech, this year. Executives have
pointed to recent improvements in AI systems as one reason for
the changes.
In January, Amazon confirmed it would cut some 16,000 jobs,
amounting to nearly 10% of its workforce. Last month, the
fintech company Block chopped nearly half of its staff, with CEO
Jack Dorsey explicitly pointing to AI tools and their growing
capability to help companies do more with smaller teams.
Meta’s planned AI investments follow a series of setbacks
with its Llama 4 models last year, including criticism that it
provided misleading results on the benchmarks it used for early
versions. It abandoned the release of the largest version of
that model, called Behemoth, which had been due out in the
summer.
The superintelligence team has been working to reassert the
company’s standing this year by building a new model called
Avocado, but the performance of that model has also lagged
expectations.
Published on March 14, 2026
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