Once again, news of preparations for mass layoffs are coming to light in Meta Platforms. According to reports, the company may terminate the jobs of about 20% of its employees. If this happens then about 16,000 employees may have to lose their jobs. According to the report, the company may take this step to balance the cost of heavy investment made on Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Besides, the company is also taking steps towards creating a team that can work more efficiently with the help of AI in the future. At present, no fixed date or final number of layoffs has been revealed.
How many employees may be affected?
According to the company’s latest filing, about 79,000 employees were working in Meta as of December 31, 2025. If the company reduces staff by 20%, the jobs of about 16,000 people may be affected. If this decision is implemented, it will be considered the biggest layoff of the company after the restructuring of 2022-23.
Major layoffs have already taken place
Mark Zuckerberg’s company has already laid off employees on a large scale. In November 2022, the company laid off about 11,000 employees, which was about 13% of the total employees at that time. About four months later, the company had announced cuts in 10,000 more jobs. Now once again the discussion of layoffs has intensified to reduce costs and make work more efficient.
Company betting big on AI
For the last one year, Mark Zuckerberg has been emphasizing on taking the company forward in the race of generative AI. Under this, Meta has offered huge salary packages to many top AI researchers to include them in its new superintelligence team. Some of these packages are said to be worth several crores of dollars for four years. The company is also planning to invest about $600 billion in building data centers by 2028.
Also investing in AI companies
Meta has been investing rapidly in the AI sector in recent months. The company recently purchased a social networking platform named Moltbook, which was built for AI agents. Apart from this, it is also preparing to spend about 2 billion dollars to buy a Chinese AI startup named Meta Manus. It is clear from all these investments that the company is working on a plan to make AI technology a major part of its business in the coming times.