Meta has completed a wave of roughly 8,000 layoffs — about 10% of its workforce — as part of a sweeping restructuring around artificial intelligence, and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged in an internal memo that the company made mistakes along the way.
In the memo, dated June 12, Zuckerberg conceded the overhaul had not been handled perfectly but reiterated that Meta does not expect further company-wide layoffs in 2026. The cuts, framed by the company as necessary to fund its AI ambitions, were paired with a redeployment of upward of 7,000 employees into newly created AI-focused groups such as Applied AI Engineering and a central analytics unit.
The reshaping is expensive. Meta has guided to capital expenditures of roughly $125 billion to $145 billion in 2026, more than double its 2025 outlay, as it races to build data centres and secure the chips needed to train and run frontier AI models.
The spending and job cuts underscore the strain behind Big Tech's AI race, in which Meta is competing with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic for talent, compute and market share. The company has poured billions into recruiting senior researchers and into its open-weight model effort after a slower-than-hoped reception for earlier releases.
Investors have largely rewarded aggressive AI spending across the sector, but some analysts warn that the scale of Meta's capital commitments raises the stakes: the outlays must eventually translate into revenue from AI products and advertising tools to justify the cost.
For employees, the restructuring marks one of the larger reductions at Meta since the "year of efficiency" cuts of 2023, and signals that even cash-rich technology giants are reshaping their workforces around a narrower set of AI priorities.