Meta plans to cut 10 percent of its work force, or roughly 8,000 employees, and close another 6,000 open roles, according to an internal memo on Thursday, as the company spends heavily on developing artificial intelligence.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, employed more than 78,000 people at the end of 2025. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said he expects much of the work done in the technology industry to eventually be overtaken by A.I.-powered systems, including coding assistants that help engineers write software.
“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, said in the memo to employees. “This is not an easy trade-off and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.”
A spokesman for Meta confirmed the cuts and declined further comment.
Across the technology industry, companies have been laying off employees as they experiment with A.I. In February, Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App and Tidal, said it was cutting 40 percent of its work force as it embraced new A.I. tools. Microsoft on Thursday said it was offering buyouts to 7 percent of its work force as it invests in A.I.
Mr. Zuckerberg is reorganizing his company around A.I. products in a fierce race to lead in the technology against rivals like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. He has made no secret of his A.I. ambitions and has described developing A.I.-powered social media products that are a kind of “personal superintelligence” that he hopes people will incorporate into their daily lives.
“At Meta, we have the resources to build the massive infrastructure required and the ability to deliver new technology to billions of people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video posted to his Facebook page in July.
Meta has made A.I. progress in fits and starts, but has lagged behind competitors in developing foundational models. To catch up, Mr. Zuckerberg has spent more than $70 billion on A.I. investments like data centers, semiconductors and real estate. Last year, he went on a spending spree to recruit top A.I. researchers, including Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, a start-up. A group of Scale’s researchers and leaders joined Meta, including the company’s chief executive, Alexandr Wang, who became the head of a new superintelligence lab at Meta.
In a call with investors in January, Mr. Zuckerberg said Meta expected to spend $115 billion to $135 billion this year, potentially nearly twice the $72 billion it spent last year. Much of it will be earmarked for A.I. development.
He has defended Meta’s heavy spending on the technology. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the company’s revenue rose 24 percent from the previous year, which Mr. Zuckerberg attributed to A.I. investments that he said improved ad targeting and recommendations of videos and other posts to users.
The latest cuts stand out because Meta for years had been a company that steadily grew its work force. That has changed. Mr. Zuckerberg has worked to reduce Meta’s number of employees and bureaucracy after what he characterized as overhiring during the Covid pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. At its peak in 2022, Meta had more than 87,000 employees.
In 2023, Mr. Zuckerberg declared a “year of efficiency” and said he would cut “managers managing managers.” Meta went on to eliminate roughly one-third of its work force, part of an effort at that time across the tech industry to shrink payrolls.
In January, Mr. Zuckerberg said new A.I. tools could make the company even more efficient. “We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” he said on a call with investors.
Meta has pushed its employees to use A.I. in their daily work. The company has started including A.I. use in many employees’ performance reviews. In March, it held an “A.I. Week” to teach employees how to use A.I. tools like agents, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Meta has trimmed back in other divisions. In January, Mr. Zuckerberg ordered cuts of around 10 percent of the company’s Reality Labs division, which works on future-facing virtual- and augmented-reality devices. It also wound down investing heavily in some projects related to the metaverse, a major initiative that has struggled to catch on with the public.
Meta will notify employees who are being laid off on May 20, and will provide severance packages for those in the United States that include “16 weeks of base pay plus two weeks for every year of employment,” according to the memo to workers. Employees outside the United States will receive similar packages that will vary by country, as will the timelines of their departures, the memo said.
“I know this is unwelcome news,” Ms. Gale, the chief people officer, wrote in the memo. “But we feel this is the best path forward, given the circumstances.”
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.
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