Meta to Cut 10 Percent of Work Force in A.I. Push

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Meta to Cut 10 Percent of Work Force in A.I. Push

The layoffs affect about 8,000 employees, with Meta also planning to close 6,000 open roles, as the company focuses on artificial intelligence.

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Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

Credit...

Noah Berger/Associated Press

By

Mike Isaac

Reporting from San Francisco

April 23, 2026

Updated

2:37 p.m. ET

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Meta plans to cut 10 percent of its work force, or roughly 8,000 employees, and close another 6,000 open roles, according to an internal memo on Thursday, as the company spends heavily on developing artificial intelligence.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, employed more than 78,000 people at the end of 2025. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said he expects much of the work being done in the technology industry to eventually be overtaken by A.I. powered systems, including coding assistants that help engineers write software.

“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, said in the memo to employees. “This is not an easy trade-off and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.”

A spokesman for Meta confirmed the cuts and declined further comment.

Mr. Zuckerberg is reorganizing his company around A.I. products amid a fierce race to lead in the technology against rivals like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Meta has made progress in fits and starts, but has lagged behind competitors in developing foundational A.I. models.

To catch up, Mr. Zuckerberg has spent more than $70 billion on A.I. investments like data centers, semiconductors and real estate to enable Meta to do the costly work of developing cutting-edge A.I. In a call with investors in January, he said the

company expected to spend $115 billion to $135 billion

this year, nearly twice the $72 billion it spent last year, much of which will be earmarked for A.I. development.

Mr. Zuckerberg has described developing A.I.-powered social media products that are a kind of “personal superintelligence,” which he hopes people will incorporate into their daily lives.

“At Meta, we have the resources to build the massive infrastructure required and the ability to deliver new technology to billions of people,” he said in a video

posted

to his Facebook page in July.

He has defended Meta’s heavy spending on the technology. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the company’s revenue rose 24 percent from the previous year, which Mr. Zuckerberg attributed to A.I. investments that he said improved ad targeting and recommendations of videos and other posts to users.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.

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