Irish staff at social media giant Meta are expected to hear early today if their jobs are at risk in the company’s latest round of job cuts, which will see thousands of roles cut globally.Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has begun notifying workers around the world about the layoffs, beginning with staff in its Asian hub in Singapore. Employees there were informed at 4am local time. European and US-based staff are expected to receive word early in their time zone. The company is reducing staff numbers by 10 per cent - around 8,000 jobs - in a bid to offset heavy investment in artificial intelligence and to boost its efficiency. If this cut were mirrored at its Irish operations, it would result in 180 roles being axed. The workforce in Ireland has been reduced by 40 per cent since its post-Covid peak of around 3,000 employees to 1,800 people across multiple sites, including Meta’s international headquarters in Dublin, a data centre in Co Meath and Reality Labs in Cork, according to an analysis by The Irish Times.The latest round of cuts is the most significant since Meta embarked on its “year of efficiency” in 2022, restructuring the company and announcing thousands of job cuts. That translated to almost 350 job losses in Meta Ireland that year, with a further 500 announced by May 2023.Last year, the company cut a number of jobs at its Irish operations as part of a round of “performance-related” cutbacks globally that it expected to trim around 5 per cent of its staff numbers.This new round of layoffs is expected to impact the engineering and product teams, but further reductions in headcount could come later in the year, sources said. On Monday, Meta informed staff that some 7,000 workers have also been reassigned to newly formed teams that are focused on AI initiatives, including products and agents. The company, which has committed well in excess of $100 billion to AI capital expenditures this year, had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March, ahead of the reassignments and layoffs.Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s top priority, committing all resources to keeping pace with rivals such as Google and OpenAI. Meta’s aggressive spending on AI has caused concern among investors, who worry that the company’s investment 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, analysts at Evercore estimate the cuts will generate only about $3 billion in savings.- Additional reporting: Bloomberg