Meta plans wider job cuts as AI-led restructuring gathers pace

Meta is pressing ahead with a broad AI-driven shake-up, with the first round of this year’s planned job cuts scheduled for May 20, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

One source said the opening phase would affect about 10% of the company’s global workforce, or close to 8,000 employees.

More layoffs are expected in the second half of the year, although the date and scale of those reductions have not yet been fixed.

The sources said executives could still revise the plan as they monitor developments in artificial intelligence.

Reuters reported last month that Meta had been considering cutting 20% or more of its workforce.

The Facebook and Instagram owner declined to comment on either the timing or the size of the planned cuts.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI as he seeks to remake the company’s inner workings around the technology, in line with a wider trend among major US businesses, especially in tech.

Amazon has cut 30,000 corporate roles in recent months, nearly 10% of its white-collar workforce, while Block slashed almost half of its staff in February.

In both cases, executives linked the cuts to efficiency gains from AI.

Layoffs. fyi said 73,212 workers in the tech sector have lost their jobs so far this year, compared with 153,000 for the whole of 2024.

For Meta, this would be its biggest round of job losses since late 2022 and early 2023, when it cut about 21,000 positions during what it called the "year of efficiency".

At that time, the company was grappling with a steep share-price fall and the collapse of COVID-era growth assumptions that had proved unsustainable.

Meta is now on firmer financial ground, but executives are still pushing for fewer layers of management and greater efficiency from AI-assisted workers.

According to its latest filing, the Menlo Park, California-based company had nearly 79,000 employees as of December 31.

Its shares have risen 3.68% since the start of the year, though they remain below the record high reached last summer.

Last year, Meta generated more than $200 billion in revenue and posted a $60 billion profit despite heavy AI spending.

In recent weeks, the company has reorganised teams in Reality Labs and reassigned engineers from across the business into a new "Applied AI" organisation focused on speeding up the development of AI agents that can write code and carry out complex tasks autonomously.

One source said some employees would also be moved into Meta Small Business, a unit created last month as part of the restructuring.

Reuters