MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA — Meta will cut roughly 8,000 jobs beginning May 20, representing about 10% of its workforce, a company spokesperson confirmed. The reductions will be the largest at the company since 2023.

Alongside the layoffs, Meta plans to eliminate approximately 6,000 open roles it had been hiring for. At the end of 2025, Meta had approximately 78,000 employees, and the company has enacted several rounds of job cuts since 2022, reducing its headcount by tens of thousands of workers.

"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," Meta chief people officer Janelle Gale said. "This is not an easy tradeoff and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here."

Meta will spend $135 billion on artificial intelligence projects this year, an amount roughly equal to its AI spending over the previous three years combined, according to a person who viewed an internal memo. The company plans to double its AI spending in 2026 to about $135 billion from $72 billion in 2025, and expects capital expenditures of $115 billion to $135 billion next year, driven by investments in Meta Superintelligence Labs and its core business.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg linked the shift to changes in how work is performed. "I think that 2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work," he said. Zuckerberg said he had seen that a single person using AI tools could now complete projects that previously required a large team.

Meta also informed employees that it would begin tracking and logging their interactions with work computers to train and improve its AI models. "We believe that this is part of Meta's strategy to leverage AI tools to automate tasks that once required large teams, allowing the company to streamline operations and reduce costs while maintaining productivity, driving an increased need for a leaner operating structure," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said.

Meta reported fourth-quarter 2025 revenue of $59.89 billion and net income of $22.77 billion, and expects first-quarter 2026 revenue of $53.5 billion to $56.5 billion.