4 Minutes
Inside Meta, the mood is shifting. Not loudly. Not officially. But quietly enough that managers have reportedly begun preparing contingency plans for something many employees hoped would stay rumor: another major round of layoffs.
The driver behind the tension isn’t falling revenue or a shrinking user base. Quite the opposite. Meta is doubling down on artificial intelligence—and the price tag for that ambition is enormous.
According to reports circulating among industry watchers, the company may cut as much as 20% of its workforce as it redirects resources toward building massive AI data centers. If the numbers hold, that could mean roughly 15,800 jobs disappearing from Meta’s payroll. The company’s latest filings at the end of 2025 listed around 79,000 employees globally.
Meta has publicly pushed back on the claims, telling Reuters that reports describing layoffs at that scale are "speculative" and based on theoretical planning scenarios. Still, internally, executives have allegedly begun asking senior leaders to prepare operational plans for what the company might look like after potential cuts.
If it happens, it would be the biggest workforce reduction since Meta’s sweeping restructuring between 2022 and 2023. CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously labeled that period the company’s "year of efficiency," during which more than 21,000 employees were let go.
The expensive race to build AI infrastructure
What’s changed since then is the scale of the AI race. Meta is reportedly planning to spend as much as $600 billion by 2028 building AI data center infrastructure. These facilities—packed with GPUs and specialized computing hardware—are the backbone of modern generative AI systems.
At the same time, the company is aggressively recruiting top researchers to form a new "superintelligence" team. Contracts offered to elite AI scientists are said to be extremely lucrative, reflecting the fierce competition among tech giants to secure talent capable of building the next generation of models.
Meta isn’t alone in reshaping its workforce around automation and AI. Earlier this year, fintech company Block cut roughly half its staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey openly arguing that AI tools allow companies to operate with far fewer employees.
Investors appear cautious about the scale of Meta’s spending. The company’s shares fell $24.47 during one recent trading session, sliding 3.83% to $613.71 before dipping slightly further in after-hours trading. Even so, the stock still sits much closer to its 52‑week high of $796.25 than its low of $479.80.
Meanwhile, Meta’s consumer ecosystem keeps expanding.
The company’s newest social platform, Threads, has quietly become one of the fastest-growing consumer apps ever released. It blasted past 100 million users in just five days—beating the previous growth record held by ChatGPT. Today, the platform has surpassed 450 million users.
That growth is starting to pressure its biggest rival. X is estimated to have between 550 million and 600 million users overall, but on mobile devices Threads is already pulling ahead in daily activity. In January 2026, Threads recorded about 141.5 million daily active users compared with roughly 125 million for X.
All of this underscores the strange moment Meta finds itself in: massive user growth, massive AI ambitions—and potentially massive job cuts to fund the future.
The company once known simply as Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021 to reflect a broader technological vision. That vision is now being reshaped again, this time around artificial intelligence. For many employees, however, the transformation may come with a personal cost.
Comments
Armin
ive seen this before, AI hype then cuts. Execs chase models, people get squeezed. Feels unfair and kinda predictable. Hope those teams get support
mechbyte
wait 20%? that many people? Sounds like panic planning to me, but if true it's brutal. AI labs need cash, humans pay the price... hmm
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