Meta is cutting deep. The social media giant confirmed Thursday it will eliminate 10% of its global workforce — roughly 8,000 employees — starting May 20, while simultaneously closing 6,000 open roles it had planned to fill. The move signals a sharp pivot away from headcount growth and toward a future where AI, not people, handles more of the company’s daily operations.
The announcement arrived in an internal memo from Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, who told staff the reductions were part of an ongoing push to run the company with greater efficiency — freeing up resources to fund massive investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
8,000 Jobs Out, $135 Billion In
The scale of Thursday’s announcement is hard to miss. Meta enters this round of cuts with a global workforce of 78,865 employees, and it is already planning further reductions in the second half of 2026. The company has committed between $115 billion and $135 billion in capital expenditure this year alone — nearly double the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025 — almost all of it directed toward AI data centers, GPUs, and the infrastructure powering its Llama models.
This is not Meta’s first round of cuts in 2026. Earlier this year the company eliminated roughly 1,000 to 1,500 positions inside Reality Labs, the unit responsible for its virtual reality and metaverse efforts, shutting down several VR game studios in the process. A second, smaller round followed in March, reaching hundreds of employees across Facebook, Reality Labs, global operations and sales.
The broader math behind Thursday’s announcement is clear — Meta reported record revenue of nearly $201 billion in 2025 and record Q4 net income of $22.8 billion. The layoffs are not a response to financial trouble — they are a reallocation toward AI at a pace that human headcount cannot keep up with.
The Tool Watching Every Click
Just days before the layoff announcement, Meta revealed to staff a new internal monitoring program that has already drawn sharp internal backlash. The Model Capability Initiative, known as MCI, installs tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ work computers, logging
- Mouse movements and click locations
- Keystrokes across hundreds of approved apps and websites
- Periodic screenshots capturing on-screen activity in context
Sites being tracked include Google, LinkedIn, GitHub, Slack, Wikipedia and Meta’s own internal tools. Multiple employees described the program in internal messages as dystopian, raising concerns about exposure of sensitive personal data. Meta says the data will not be used for performance evaluations, and that safeguards protect sensitive content — but the timing, days before a company-wide layoff, has deepened unease inside the company.
The stated purpose is to teach AI agents how humans actually use computers — how they navigate dropdown menus, use keyboard shortcuts and move between applications — so those agents can eventually replicate the same tasks independently.
Zuckerberg’s AI Ambitions Drive the Cuts
The restructuring reflects the most aggressive bet of Mark Zuckerberg‘s tenure as CEO. Meta last year acquired a 49% stake in data-labeling firm Scale AI for more than $14 billion, bringing Scale’s former CEO Alexandr Wang in-house to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs. The company has also moved to replace third-party content moderation contractors with AI-powered systems, further reducing its dependence on human labor at scale.
Meta is not alone in this pattern. The tech industry has shed more than 95,000 jobs across hundreds of layoff events so far in 2026. Amazon announced the elimination of roughly 16,000 corporate positions in January. Microsoft this week offered voluntary buyouts to approximately 7% of eligible U.S. employees — a first for the 51-year-old company. Oracle cut up to 30,000 positions to fund its own AI infrastructure push.
The pattern is consistent across all of them— record revenues, rising profits, and fewer people.
Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter 2026 earnings on Wednesday, April 29, alongside Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft. The company’s shares fell 2.4% on Thursday and remain roughly flat for the year.
Source: CNBC
