Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks out of federal court in downtown Los Angeles after defending the company in a landmark social media addiction trial on February 19, 2026.
John Putman Anadolu | getty images
meta Plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, while continuing to increase investment in artificial intelligence.
According to a Thursday memo to employees, the cuts will begin May 20 and the company is canceling plans to hire people for 6,000 open roles. Bloomberg was in first place report On retrenchment.
Meta’s latest round of cuts follows a number of smaller job cuts that the company said were necessary to improve efficiency while focusing its efforts on generic AI, where it lags behind OpenAI. Google And anthropological.
CNBC reported in January that Meta laid off about 10% of its employees who were working on Metaverse-related projects. At that time, about 1,000 people were let go at the company’s Reality Labs unit.
Another round of layoffs began in March and affected hundreds of employees working across various units, including Facebook, Reality Labs, global operations and sales. Meta also said last month that it would move away from the third-party vendors and contractors that have historically handled content moderation tasks, in favor of relying on various AI technologies.
As companies take notice of the AI boom, job cuts are on the rise in the tech sector. Microsoft confirmed on Thursday that it will offer voluntary buyouts to some US employees, a first for the 51-year-old software giant. About 7% of U.S. workers are eligible, according to a person familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the numbers are not being made public.
In January, Amazon announced plans to eliminate about 16,000 corporate jobs, the second round of massive job cuts since last October.
Meta said in his latest annual report It said in January it had a global workforce of 78,865 employees as of Dec. 31, down from 86,482 at the end of 2022, following a wave of hiring across the tech industry following the Covid pandemic. The company said in a 2021 annual report As of December 31, 2020, its global workforce reached 58,604 employees.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s top effort is to strengthen his company’s position in AI. Earlier this month, Meta introduced its first major artificial intelligence model following the costly hire of Scale AI’s Alexander Wang in June.
Meta this week told employees it is using a new employee tracking tool called the Model Capability Initiative, aimed at capturing data from staff members using their work computers. The data, which includes employee keystrokes and mouse clicks, is necessary to train AI agents, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings on 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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