Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, plans to lay off 10% of its workforce amid ongoing investments in generative AI.
The company offered details to employees in a memo. Bloomberg had the first report of the cutbacks, following an earlier one by Reuters that reductions were expected.
Roughly 8,000 employees will be let go starting May 20, and 6,000 open roles will not be filled, the internal memo said.
Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, wrote in the memo that the layoffs are “part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.”
Striving to catch up to rivals OpenAi, Anthropic and Microsoft in the AI arms race, Meta previously had announced plans to nearly double its spending on AI to $135 billion in 2026. The company already has been streamlining Reality Labs, its subsidiary focused on developing products and experiences for the metaverse. The company changed its name from Facebook in 2022 to reflect its strategic shift. Metaverse efforts have incurred sizable losses since, while the perceived demand for AI services has been a lightning striking the entire tech sector, prompting many big players to change course.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other execs are likely to elaborate on their updated strategic thinking when the company reports its first-quarter earnings on April 29. Fellow tech giants Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft also are due to release quarterly numbers that day.
The slimdown of staff continues a trend in the tech sector, which long had been known for its largesse and expansionist tendencies as many traditional businesses headed in the opposite direction. Staffing levels surged as tech companies asserted their dominance in the early 21st century. More recently, a reckoning has taken hold, with a drop in digital advertising followed by the AI scramble prompting tens of thousands of layoffs.
In parallel with the Meta cuts, Microsoft said it will offer buyouts to 7% of its workforce, or about 8,750 employees, the most extensive such initiative in the company’s 51-year history.
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