Catenaa, Saturday, March 14, 2026- Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, as Meta seeks to offset costly AI infrastructure bets.
No date has been set for the cuts, and the magnitude has not been finalized, a report by Reuters said.
Top executives have recently signaled their plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, the report said.
“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to questions about the plan.
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.
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.
