Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles after defending the company in a landmark social media addiction trial, Feb. 19, 2026.
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Meta plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, as it continues ramping up investments in artificial intelligence.
The cuts will begin May 20, and the company is scrapping plans to hire people for 6,000 open roles, according to a Thursday memo to employees. Bloomberg was first to report on the layoffs.
Meta's latest round of cuts follows several smaller job reductions that the company said was necessary to to improve efficiency while focusing its efforts on generative AI, where it's lagged OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
CNBC reported in January that Meta fired about 10% of employees who were working on metaverse-related projects. Roughly 1,000 people in the company's Reality Labs unit were let go at that time.
Another round of layoffs commenced in March and affected hundreds of employees working in a variety of units, including Facebook, Reality Labs, global operations and sales. Meta also said last month that it would shift away from third-party vendors and contractors, which have historically handled content moderation tasks, in favor of relying on various AI technologies.
Job cuts are picking up across the tech sector as companies reckon with the AI boom. Microsoft confirmed on Thursday that it will offer voluntary buyouts to some U.S. employees, a first for the 51-year-old software giant. About 7% of U.S. employees are eligible, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named because the number isn't being made public.
In January, Amazon announced plans to eliminate about 16,000 corporate jobs, marking its second round of mass job cuts since last October.
Meta said in its latest annual report in January that it had a global workforce of 78,865 employees as of Dec. 31, down from 86,482 in late 2022 coming off a wave of hiring throughout the tech industry in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. The company said in a 2021 annual report that its global workforce reached 58,604 employees as of Dec. 31, 2020.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's top effort is to bolster his company's position in AI. Earlier this month, Meta debuted its first major artificial intelligence model since the costly hiring of Scale AI's Alexandr Wang in June.
This week Meta revealed to staff that it's using a new employee tracking tool called the Model Capability Initiative, intended to capture data from staff members using their work computers. The data, which includes employee keystrokes and mouse clicks, is needed to train AI agents, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings Wednesday, along with fellow tech giants Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft.
Meta shares fell 2.4% on Thursday and are now about flat for the year.
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