Meta is laying off roughly 8,000 employees and scrapping hiring plans for another 6,000 roles, marking yet another round of cuts at a company that seems to reorganize its workforce the way most people rearrange furniture: frequently, and with increasing aggression.
The reductions amount to about 10% of Meta’s total headcount. They land hardest on teams tied to the metaverse and Reality Labs, the very division the company once staked its entire identity on. The pivot now points squarely at generative AI, with Meta redirecting personnel and capital toward AI research, infrastructure, and deployment at a scale that makes previous investments look like a warm-up.
The numbers behind Meta’s AI-first gamble
Meta plans to spend up to $145 billion this year on AI infrastructure alone. That includes advanced GPU clusters and next-generation data centers, the kind of hardware arms race that has turned Nvidia into the most important company in tech and sent power utilities scrambling to keep up.
Here’s the thing: Meta posted roughly $26 billion in net income in Q1 2026. This isn’t a company cutting jobs because it’s struggling. It’s cutting jobs because it’s choosing to funnel resources into a different bet entirely.
