Meta is planning widespread layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly bets on artificial intelligence infrastructure and prepare for greater efficiencies generated by AI-assisted workers.
No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been determined, the people said.
Top executives recently brought the plans to the attention of other senior Meta leaders and told them to start planning how to scale them back, two of the people said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the cuts.
Meta did not immediately comment.
If Meta decides on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company’s largest since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it called the “year of efficiency.” It employed nearly 79,000 people as of Dec. 31, according to its latest report.
The company laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022, or about 13% of its workforce at the time. About four months later, it announced it would cut another 10,000 jobs.
Over the past year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more strongly in generative AI. The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to attract 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 media 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 that he was starting to see “projects that used to require large teams now being done by a single, very talented person.”
Meta’s plans reflect a broader pattern among major U.S. companies, particularly in technology, this year. Executives have pointed to recent improvements in artificial intelligence systems as one reason for the changes. In January, Amazon confirmed it would cut about 16,000 jobs, representing nearly 10% of its workforce.
Last month, financial technology company Block cut nearly half its staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly pointing to artificial intelligence tools and their growing ability 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 in the benchmarks it used for early versions. It abandoned the launch of the larger version of that model, called the Behemoth, which was due to come out in the summer.
The superintelligence team has been working to firm up the company’s position this year by building a new model called Avocado, but the performance of that model has also been lagging behind expectations.
