Meta to lay off 8,000 workers, close 6,000 roles in AI shift

Meta is cutting about 8,000 jobs, or roughly 10% of its workforce, and will not fill 6,000 open roles as Mark Zuckerberg pushes the company deeper into artificial intelligence. The layoffs are set to begin on May 20, according to a memo to employees, and the move underscores a new labor math in big tech: AI spending is rising while the people budget shrinks.

The company framed the reductions as part of a drive to run more efficiently and offset heavy investment in AI. That spending has become central to Meta’s effort to catch up with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, even as it builds new tools and infrastructure for generative AI. The result is a sharper split inside the company between functions that support the AI push and roles that are being cut, consolidated or left unfilled.

This round is Meta’s biggest since the 2022-2023 restructuring that Zuckerberg branded the company’s “Year of Efficiency.” In March 2023, Zuckerberg said the goals were to make Meta “a better technology company” and improve financial performance. That earlier overhaul ultimately eliminated roughly 21,000 jobs across multiple rounds and became a template for how aggressively Meta would use layoffs to reset costs.

The latest cuts follow a series of smaller reductions over the past year. Meta cut roughly 10% of employees working on metaverse-related projects in January 2026, then carried out another round in March that affected hundreds of workers across Facebook, Reality Labs, global operations and sales. Last month, Meta also said it would shift away from some third-party vendors and contractors for content moderation in favor of AI technologies, another sign that automation is moving beyond product development and into day-to-day operations.

Zuckerberg’s latest message to employees kept the focus on efficiency, with the company casting the move as part of building “the future of human connection.” For workers, the immediate effect is more concrete: fewer jobs, fewer open positions and a stronger signal that AI is no longer just a growth story at Meta. It is also a cost story, one that may shape hiring, staffing and restructuring across corporate America as more companies use AI investment to justify permanent workforce shrinkage.