Meta will fire roughly 10% of its workforce next month as the social media giant shifts its focus and its massive budget toward artificial intelligence.
In a memo sent to staff on Thursday, the company announced it will cut 8,000 employees and leave thousands of other open positions vacant.
To fund this transition, Meta plans to spend $135 billion on AI this year alone, an amount equal to its total AI spending over the last three years combined.
This move follows a series of hints from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently praised how AI makes individual workers more productive. He suggested that a single person using AI can now finish work that once required a whole team.
“I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” Zuckerberg noted during a public talk in January.
The news has left current employees feeling anxious and frustrated. Meta recently told workers it would track their computer activity to train its new AI models, a move that feels cold to those facing the exit.
One employee told the BBC that the atmosphere inside the office has changed for the worse.
“This company has become obsessed with AI,” they remarked, describing the new monitoring as “dystopian” given the looming layoffs.
Meta is not alone in this brutal pivot. Throughout the tech industry, giants like Amazon and Oracle have cut tens of thousands of roles this year to balance the high costs of AI infrastructure.
Even smaller firms like Block have slashed nearly half their staff. On the same day as Meta’s announcement, Microsoft offered thousands of its veteran employees voluntary buyouts to reduce its headcount.
While Meta had briefly returned to its original staffing levels last year, these upcoming cuts represent the company’s largest layoff since 2023.
For the thousands of families affected, the “Year of AI” feels less like a technological breakthrough and more like a direct threat to their livelihoods.
