Meta weighs laying off 20% of staff to fund AI infrastructure

Meta is considering large-scale layoffs that could affect up to 20% of its employees. According to sources, the cuts would help Facebook's parent company offset aggressive spending on AI infrastructure, as well as the cost of acquisitions and of hiring artificial intelligence specialists.

The potential scale looks striking even by tech-industry standards. By the latest figures, Meta employs about 74,000 people, and around 15,000 jobs could be at risk. For comparison, in November 2022, when the advertising market slowed and the company's shares plunged after the failure of its metaverse experiment, Mark Zuckerberg laid off 11,000 employees. That round was called a turning point for the company; the current one may be even bigger.

The key difference from 2022 is that Meta is now financially healthy. Its advertising business has recovered and keeps growing, and quarterly revenue is setting records. The reason for the potential layoffs is not a crisis but a strategic choice: Zuckerberg has committed to unprecedented investment in artificial intelligence. In early 2025 the company announced capital expenditures of 60–65 billion dollars, most of which will go to building data centers and buying chips to train AI models.

At the same time, Meta is hiring AI specialists aggressively, offering compensation packages that are hard to ignore. According to available information, the company is actively poaching researchers from leading AI labs and is making AI-focused acquisitions, aiming to take the lead in the generative AI race.

All of this takes resources, and not only financial ones. Big tech companies pivoting to AI typically cut "classic" divisions while expanding headcount in new areas. At Meta, the potential candidates for cuts are content moderation teams and some operational and infrastructure units not directly tied to AI. The logic is simple: every dollar saved on traditional functions can go into the accelerating AI race.

This approach reflects a broader trend in Big Tech. Microsoft, Google and Amazon carried out several rounds of layoffs in 2023–2025 while aggressively hiring AI engineers. The difference with Meta is that at the other companies, the cuts partly came amid slowing growth. Meta is cutting from a position of strong financial health, which makes it a cleaner signal of a strategic pivot rather than a forced measure.

If the layoffs happen at the stated scale, the consequences will reach beyond one company. Thousands of highly qualified specialists, including product managers, engineers and operations managers, would hit the job market at once, and without the AI engineer profile that is now most in demand in the industry. For Meta itself, it means concentrating all its resources on a single strategic bet, the one on which Zuckerberg is staking the company's future.

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and is banned in Russia.