Meta is planning across-the-board job cuts that could affect more than 20% of the company to offset investments in expensive artificial intelligence infrastructure and prepare for AI-assisted workforce efficiency gains, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
No date has been set for the cuts, and the scale has not been finalized, officials said.
Executives recently informed Meta’s other senior executives of the plan and told them to plan how to make cuts, two people said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make the details of the cuts public.
Mehta did not immediately comment.
If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company’s largest since the company’s restructuring from late 2022 to early 2023, which it called its “year of efficiency.” The company employed about 79,000 people as of Dec. 31, according to its latest filing.
The company laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022, about 13% of its workforce at the time. About four months later, the company announced another 10,000 job cuts.
Over the past year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more strongly in generative AI. The company has been offering huge salary packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years to recruit top AI researchers to its new superintelligence team. The company announced that it plans to invest $600 billion in data center construction by 2028.
Earlier this week, it acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents. Meta is also investing at least $2 billion to acquire Chinese AI startup Manas, Reuters previously reported.
Mr. Zuckerberg alluded to greater efficiency from investments, saying in January that projects that used to require large teams are now being accomplished by one very talented person.
Meta’s plans reflect a broader pattern for major U.S. companies this year, especially tech companies. Executives point to recent improvements in AI systems as one reason for the change. Amazon announced in January that it would cut about 16,000 jobs, nearly 10% of its workforce.
Fintech company Bloc cut nearly half its workforce last month, with CEO Jack Dorsey specifically pointing to the growth of AI tools and their ability to help companies accomplish more with smaller teams.
Meta’s planned AI investments follow a series of setbacks with its Llama 4 model last year, including criticism that benchmarks used in early versions provided misleading results. The company has abandoned the release of the largest version of the same model, “Behemoth,” which was scheduled to be released in the summer.
The Superintelligence team has been working to reaffirm the company’s position this year by building a new model called Avocado, but that model’s performance has also fallen short of expectations.
