Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns several social media giants like Facebook and WhatsApp, is laying off 8,000 employees, with thousands of employees being notified.
According to the company, the layoffs are a part of a restructuring aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs while investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI).
The company began notifying workers around the world on Wednesday morning, starting with employees in the Asian hub Singapore, who got the note at 4 am local time, Bloomberg reported. European and US-based staff are expected to receive word early in their time zone as well, according to an internal memo.
Staff are being encouraged to work from home while the company cuts roughly 8,000 roles globally. This latest round of cuts is expected to hit Meta’s engineering and product teams in particular, and additional layoffs could come later in the year, the Bloomberg report quoted people familiar with the company’s plans as saying.
Will Mark Zuckerberg’s AI push pay off?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s top priority, committing all resources to keeping pace with rivals like Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI. That’s led to changes to Meta’s workforce and the way it operates.
The company has undergone waves of layoffs over the past few years as Zuckerberg has pushed for “greater efficiency”. According to reports, he has encouraged engineers to use AI agents to assist with coding and other tasks, outlined plans to track employees’ devices to improve the technology, and spent time coding his own AI-powered assistant to handle some of his CEO duties, such as soliciting employee feedback.
Meta’s aggressive spending on AI has raised concerns among investors, who worry that the company’s investments may not ultimately pay off. While Meta has framed the layoffs as an opportunity to “offset” the cost of some of its major AI investments, Evercore analysts estimate the cuts will yield only about $3 billion in savings.
That’s just a small portion of Meta’s projected capital expenditures this year, which could hit $145 billion, and the additional hundreds of billions that the company anticipates spending on AI infrastructure before the end of the decade.
