Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tied the company’s planned layoffs to rising investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure, underscoring a growing trade-off between spending on compute and workforce costs.
Speaking at an internal town hall, Zuckerberg said Meta’s two largest cost centers are compute infrastructure and employee-related expenses, adding that increased investment in AI is forcing the company to reduce headcount.
“If we’re investing more in one area to serve our community, then that means we have less capital to allocate to the other,” he told employees, indicating that workforce reductions are part of broader capital reallocation decisions.
Meta is set to lay off about 10% of its workforce starting May 20, with additional cuts under consideration later in the year. While Zuckerberg stopped short of confirming further layoffs, he did not rule them out, saying the company does not yet have a clear long-term roadmap for how its AI-driven transformation will unfold.
The CEO emphasized that the layoffs are not directly tied to Meta’s internal restructuring around becoming an “AI-native” organization or its push to build autonomous AI agents capable of performing work tasks. However, the broader shift toward AI has reshaped priorities across the company.
The announcements have triggered internal backlash, with some employees criticizing leadership decisions, particularly as Meta simultaneously expands AI-focused initiatives. These include efforts to increase internal use of AI tools and new data collection mechanisms aimed at improving AI systems.
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