Meta reportedly plans sweeping layoffs as AI costs increase | Meta

Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta tries to offset costly AI infrastructure bets and prepare for higher productivity from AI-powered workers.

Sources said no date has been set for the outages and their magnitude has not been determined.

Senior executives recently communicated their plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to start planning how to step back, two sources said. The sources spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to disclose the outages.

Meta had no immediate comment.

If Meta settles for the 20% figure, the layoffs would be the most significant since the company’s restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023, which it calls a “year of productivity.” It employed about 79,000 people as of December 31, according to the latest records.

The company laid off 11,000 people in November 2022, or about 13% of its workforce at that time. About four months later, it announced it would cut another 10,000 jobs.

For the past year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more strongly in the generative AI space. The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to recruit top AI researchers to a new superintelligence team. The company announced that it plans to invest $600 billion to build data centers by 2028.

Earlier this week, it acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for artificial intelligence agents. Meta is also spending at least $2 billion to acquire Chinese artificial intelligence startup Manus, Reuters previously reported.

Zuckerberg cited efficiency gains from the investments, saying in January that he was starting to see “projects that used to require large teams are now being accomplished by a single, highly skilled person.”

Meta’s plans reflect a broader pattern among major U.S. companies this year, especially in tech. Executives pointed to recent advances in artificial intelligence systems as a reason for the changes. In January, Amazon confirmed it would cut 16,000 jobs, representing about 10% of its workforce.

Last month, fintech company Block laid off nearly half its staff, while CEO Jack Dorsey openly pointed to AI tools and their growing ability to help companies do more with smaller teams.

Meta’s planned AI investments follow a series of glitches with Llama 4 models last year; This includes criticism that the benchmarks it uses for older versions provide misleading results. The launch of the largest version of this model, called Behemoth, which was planned to be released in the summer, was abandoned.

This year, the super intelligence team is working to reassert the company’s position by creating a new model called Avocado, but the performance of this model also fell short of expectations.