Meta will cut 10% of its staff next month — roughly 8,000 jobs — as the 1.7 trillion dollar social-media group "runs the company more efficiently" to offset CEO Mark Zuckerberg's AI spending spree, according to an internal memo cited by the FT. Meta is also no longer filling 6,000 positions it had previously planned to hire for. Lay-offs are scheduled for 20 May and will include an 18-month healthcare package for affected US employees, according to Chief People Officer Janelle Gale.
The cuts offset the extraordinary AI investment Zuckerberg has committed. Meta said in January that capital expenditure could nearly double to 135 billion dollars this year; the group has also been spending heavily on elite talent to catch up with Google and OpenAI on cutting-edge models. Zuckerberg has centred the AI strategy on what he calls "personal superintelligence"; this month Meta launched Muse Spark, a new AI model that the company acknowledges still lags the best Western rivals. A new data-centre project, "Meta Compute", aims at "tens of gigawatts this decade and hundreds of gigawatts or more" — each gigawatt of data-centre capacity costs tens of billions of dollars to build.
The move lands the same day Microsoft told staff it was offering voluntary redundancy to about 7% of its US workforce (see our Microsoft brief). Staff nerves are also fraying over Meta's plan to install tracking software that would record employees' mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and screen content to train AI agents that could autonomously carry out work tasks — raising fears that workers are training the models that will replace them. Reuters first reported the lay-offs and the tracking plan. Source: Financial Times, 23 April 2026, Hannah Murphy.