Meta is planning sweeping lay-offs that could affect 20 per cent or more of the company, three sources told Reuters.
The reported move comes as the Facebook and Instagram parent seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence (AI) 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 finalised, the people said.
Top executives have recently signalled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the sources said.
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“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to questions about the plan.
Following recent cuts at Meta Ireland, the company brought its headcount to fewer than 1,800 in 2024, down from over 2,000 the previous year.
If Meta settles on the 20 per cent figure, the lay-offs 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 31st, according to its latest filing.
The company laid off 11,000 staffers in November 2022, or about 13 per cent of its workforce at the time. Around four months later, it announced it was cutting another 10,000 jobs.
Over the last year, chief executive 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 (€523 billion) to build data centres 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 start-up Manus, Reuters has 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 big US 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 per cent of its workforce. Last month, the fintech company Block chopped nearly half of its staff, with chief executive 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. – Reuters
