Meta Platforms Inc. is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three people familiar with the matter said, as the world’s largest social media company looks to cut AI cost and prepares for greater efficiency brought on by AI-assisted workers.
No date has been set for the Meta playoffs and the magnitude has not been finalised yet, the people said. Top executives have signalled the plans to other senior leaders and told them to begin planning on how to pare back, two of the people said. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorised to disclose the job cuts.
“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to questions about the plan.
If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company’s most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the “year of efficiency”. The company laid off 11,000 staffers in November 2022, or around 13% of its workforce at the time. Around four months later, it announced it was cutting another 10,000 jobs.
As on 31 December 2025, Meta Platforms employed nearly 79,000 people across the world, according to its latest filing.
Focus on Generative AI
Over the last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more forcefully in Generative AI. The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to court top AI researchers to a new superintelligence team.
The company has said it plans to invest $600 billion to build data centres by 2028. Earlier this week, it acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents. Meta is also spending at least $2 billion to buy Chinese AI startup Manus, Reuters previously reported.
Zuckerberg has alluded to efficiency gains from the AI investments, saying in January he was starting to see “projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person”.
Meta’s plans reflect a broader pattern among major US companies, particularly in tech, this year. Executives have pointed to recent improvements in AI systems as one reason for the changes.
In January, Amazon.com Inc. confirmed it would cut some 16,000 jobs, amounting to nearly 10% of its workforce. Last month, the fintech company Block chopped nearly half of its staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly pointing to AI tools and their growing capability to help companies do more with smaller teams.
Meta’s planned AI investments follow a series of setbacks with its Llama 4 models last year, including criticism it provided misleading results on the benchmarks it used for early versions. It abandoned the release of the largest version of that model, called Behemoth, which had been due out in the summer.
The superintelligence team has been working to reassert the company’s standing this year by building a new model called Avocado, but the performance of that model has also lagged expectations.
