Meta lays off thousands to fund AI investments and restructuring
Thousands of Meta workers lost jobs as the company shifted more than 7,000 others into AI work and pressed ahead with a $600 billion buildout.
Meta’s latest round of layoffs hit thousands of employees just as the company leans harder into artificial intelligence, turning cost cuts into part of the funding model for its next growth phase. The company told staff it would trim 10% of employees on Wednesday, May 20, while moving more than 7,000 people into new AI-related initiatives and closing 6,000 open roles, a restructuring that affects roughly 20% of the workforce when transfers are included.
At the end of March, Meta reported 77,986 employees. By that measure, the company’s restructuring is not a narrow efficiency drive but a broad reset of how it wants to organize around AI. Layoff emails went out in three waves at 4 a.m. local time across regions, and employees were instructed to work from home on May 20 as the cuts rolled through the company’s global operations.
The hardest hit teams included Integrity, cybersecurity and content design, underscoring how deeply the changes reached into the machinery that keeps Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp running. In an internal memo shared with employees on Monday, Meta said the cuts were paired with organizational changes designed to improve AI workflows and support a more AI-native operating model. In the same email to affected staffers, management described the headcount reduction as part of a “continued effort to run the company more efficiently” and to offset other investments.
Those investments are enormous. Mark Zuckerberg has said Meta may spend as much as $600 billion on data centers by 2028, a scale that shows how aggressively the company is building for a future centered on AI agents. Zuckerberg has argued that AI already allows work that once took large teams to be done by one highly talented person, a statement that now reads less like a prediction than a management doctrine.
For U.S. employees, the severance package included 16 weeks, or four months, of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of continuous employment, along with 18 months of healthcare coverage for workers and their families. Meta’s last major workforce reduction came during its 2022-2023 “year of efficiency,” when it cut 11,000 jobs in November 2022 and later announced another 10,000 cuts. Earlier reporting had pointed to layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company as AI costs mounted, a sign that Meta’s labor decisions are becoming the clearest evidence yet of a broader bargain in Big Tech: workers are being asked to finance the AI race with their jobs.
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