Meta cuts 8,000 jobs — 10% of staff — while AI spending climbs past $115 billion

Meta is laying off about 8,000 employees — roughly 10% of its global workforce — while also scrapping plans to fill 6,000 open roles, according to an internal memo from chief people officer Janelle Gale sent to staff this quarter. The company confirmed the cuts and said it would not hire for the frozen positions, describing the move as an effort to “run the company more efficiently.” The reduction is the clearest signal yet that the 2026 artificial-intelligence spending race is being financed, in part, by the salaries of the people building everything else.

The scale matters because it sets a template. Microsoft announced voluntary buyouts for a portion of its workforce the same week, and tech-industry layoff trackers have now counted more than 50,000 corporate tech job cuts since the start of the year. Jobless claims edged up to 214,000 last week, slightly above consensus. Meta is the largest single cut in the sequence — and the first time a company has paired a workforce reduction of this size with a public commitment to spend more than $115 billion on infrastructure in the same calendar year.

That $115–135 billion capital-expenditure guidance, first outlined in Meta’s January earnings release, is nearly double the $72.2 billion the company spent in 2025 and roughly the size of the entire annual economy of Kuwait. The money is flowing to data centers, Nvidia and custom-chip orders, and the Superintelligence Labs division built around Mark Zuckerberg’s bet that artificial general intelligence will arrive within the decade. Against that spend, the 8,000 cuts — at rough midpoint salary estimates — save the company well under $2 billion a year. The layoffs are not funding the AI build. They are a cultural signal that the company is prioritizing it.

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The commitment carries several unresolved bets. Meta’s foundation models have lagged OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini in head-to-head benchmarks, and the company has been purchasing smaller labs and poaching senior researchers at seven- and eight-figure packages rather than producing a breakthrough of its own. Analysts at Bernstein and MoffettNathanson have openly questioned whether the AI capex will earn a return comparable to Meta’s advertising business, which still funds the entire plan. The 10% cut also follows a series of smaller reductions in 2024 and 2025, meaning Meta is now leaner than it was when Zuckerberg declared a “year of efficiency” three years ago — while spending far more.

For workers, the cuts land unevenly. Tech-industry hiring has cooled for twelve straight months, and engineers displaced at Meta’s pay grade will find fewer comparable roles than they would have two years ago. Visa-holding staff are especially exposed — losing a sponsoring job triggers a 60-day grace period under US immigration rules. For competitors, the cuts are an opening: Salesforce, Oracle and several defense-tech startups have signaled active hiring into AI roles. For advertisers, the cut changes little in the short term, since the teams most exposed sit in product and operations rather than the ads stack.

The layoffs will formally begin on May 20. Meta next reports earnings on April 29, which will deliver the first full picture of Q1 2026 capex flow and the early returns, if any, from the Superintelligence Labs investment. The 6,000 frozen open roles will remain on the books without hiring activity for the remainder of the year.

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