Meta is laying off roughly 8,000 workers; that’s about 10% of its entire workforce. And the timing is no coincidence.

The company is about to spend more on AI this year than it has in the past three years combined.

The Numbers

Meta told employees in an internal memo on Thursday that it plans to cut 10% of its staff next month. That’s around 8,000 people gone.

The company also plans to leave thousands of open positions unfilled. Jobs that were being actively hired for, just gone from the books.

This will be Meta’s biggest round of layoffs since 2023.

Budget Tradeoff

Meta plans to spend $135 billion on AI in 2026 alone. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly equal to everything the company spent on AI over the previous three years combined.

That kind of spending doesn’t happen quietly. Something has to give, and in this case, it’s people.

The tech industry as a whole is pouring money into AI infrastructure, tools, and models at a pace the world has never seen before.

Back in January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said something that, looking back, now feels like a clear warning.

He pointed out how productive AI workers had become. He noted that one person using AI tools could now handle projects that used to need an entire team.

“I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” Zuckerberg said. He wasn’t wrong. The layoffs are proof of that belief in action.

Also read: Atlassian Just Cut 1,600 Jobs – And AI Is the Reason Why

Job Cuts 

Since 2022, Meta has gone through several rounds of job cuts. It shed tens of thousands of workers during what Zuckerberg himself once called a “year of efficiency.”

Then it started hiring again. By last year, total employee numbers had climbed back close to pre-layoff levels.

This round of cuts wipes out much of that rehiring. It signals a real change, not just a temporary cost-cutting move, but a fundamental change in how Meta sees its workforce going forward.

Earlier this year, Meta already laid off around 2,000 employees in two smaller rounds. Workers had been bracing for something bigger for weeks; now it’s arrived.

Also read: Investors Foresee Even More AI Job Displacement in 2026

AI Monitoring

Just this week, Meta informed staff that it would begin tracking and logging their interactions with work computers to help train and improve its own AI models.

One employee described the move as “dystopian,” especially given the layoffs looming overhead. “This company has become obsessed with AI,” that employee told the BBC.

Across the tech industry, companies are cutting staff while spending more on AI than ever before.

Amazon has laid off more than 30,000 workers this year, and Oracle has cut more than 10,000 jobs. Block, a smaller AI company, laid off nearly half its staff,  more than 4,000 people. 

Also on Thursday, Microsoft announced it would offer voluntary buyouts to thousands of longer-tenured employees.

Nearly every one of these companies has pointed to AI, either its growing capabilities or the need to invest heavily in it, as a reason why fewer human workers are needed.