Meta Could Lay Off 20% of Staff as AI Spending Surges

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Meta is reportedly planning to cut 20% or more of its entire workforce. If it is true, it will become one of the biggest layoffs in the US in 2026.

Meta Planning to Cut 20% of Staff

Couple of sources familiar with the matter confirmed the plans to Reuters, making it the biggest story this week. 

Meta employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, 2025. A 20% cut means roughly 15,800 people could lose their jobs, nearly four times the number recently laid off from the fintech company Block.

And this is not their first time making such huge changes.

In November 2022, Meta laid off about 11,000 employees, roughly 13% of its workforce, after over-hiring during the pandemic and facing falling ad revenue. Zuckerberg branded that as the company’s “Year of Efficiency”.

In 2023, the company cut another 10,000 jobs as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” restructuring to reduce costs and streamline operations. 

Just this January, they laid off approximately 1,500 workers from their Reality Labs division.

Maybe Zuckerberg is competing with Bezos too, on who will come up with the biggest number. Amazon just got away with 30,000 job cuts. Then, there is also billionaire-owner Larry Ellison’s Oracle, which is also planning to let go of 30,000 roles to build data centers.

However, no official date has been set for these upcoming layoffs this time, and Meta’s own spokesperson, Andy Stone, dismissed the report as “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”

But reports say that top executives at Meta have recently informed several senior leaders across the company about the potential layoffs. These leaders were asked to start preparing internal plans on how their teams could be reduced, including identifying roles and departments that might be scaled back.

There is also a huge secret around it. Even high-level managers report being in the dark regarding specific criteria for the layoffs, implying decisions are being made at the senior VP level

And the excuse behind this? AI. 

How AI is Destroying Jobs at Meta?

We have heard that because LLMs are now so powerful at writing code or making marketing campaigns, we don’t need so many developers or marketers.

But that’s not the only way AI is impacting hiring and firing.

See, building AI is also obscenely expensive. You need to build data centers and hire the best engineers with huge packages to stay on top of the game. Still, Meta is investing everything in it.

Cutting staff is one of the fastest ways large companies try to save money when investments rise sharply.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company has committed to spending between $115 billion and $135 billion in capital expenditure in 2026 alone, according to The New York Times. That’s not all.  They will invest $600 billion into building AI data centers by 2028. That’s a huge commitment.

The company is also spending aggressively on acquisitions. It acquired Moltbook, an AI agent social networking platform, just a couple of days ago. It also paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a data labeling startup, to fuel its model training.

To fund this AI race, something has to give, and that “something” appears to be headcount.

Bottom Line

Meta is a company in the middle of a high-stakes transformation. It is spending like a nation-state to win the AI race, but its AI products keep falling short of rivals. 

Meanwhile, thousands of real employees face an uncertain future as their employer bets its entire identity on technology that hasn’t yet delivered.

Whether Zuckerberg’s AI-first strategy pays off will take years to determine. But the layoffs will be painful and historic. They would represent the most sweeping corporate restructuring in the tech sector’s history.