Summary: Meta will cut approximately 8,000 employees (10% of its workforce) starting May 20, cancel 6,000 vacant positions and plan additional cuts for the second half of 2026. The layoffs, announced via an internal memo from HR chief Janelle Gale, are structural rather than performance-based, and reorganize teams into AI-focused “pods,” while Meta spends between 115 and 135 billion dollars in AI infrastructure this year. The cuts come alongside executive stock options worth up to $921 million each and a workplace surveillance program that captures employees’ keystrokes to train artificial intelligence agents.
Meta told employees Wednesday which will cut approximately 8,000 jobs, about 10% of its global workforce, starting May 20. The company is also canceling 6,000 open applications that it had planned to fill, bringing the effective workforce reduction to 14,000 positions. Additional cuts are planned for the second half of the year, although their timing and scope have not been defined. If the second wave coincides with the first, Meta will have eliminated about 20% of its pre-2026 workforce. The memo announcing the cuts was written by Janelle Gale, Meta’s head of human resources, who said the announcement came early because details had already leaked. “We are doing this as part of our ongoing effort to run the business more efficiently and allow us to offset the other investments we are making.“Gale wrote.”This is not an easy compensation and will mean letting go of people who have made significant contributions to Meta during their time here.“
The investments he refers to cost between 115,000 and 135,000 million dollars this year alone. That’s Meta’s guided capital spending for 2026, a 73% increase from the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025, almost all of it directed at AI infrastructure. The company is building Prometheus, a one-gigawatt AI supercluster in Ohio that will come online this year, and Hyperion, a 2,250-acre, $10 billion facility in Louisiana with capacity for five gigawatts. It hired Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, as its first chief AI officer in June 2025 through a deal that included a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Is Poaching elite AI talent with packages valued at up to $1.5 billion. for a single engineer. The people who are hired are not the same people who are fired. That’s the point.
The continuous layoffs
The May cuts are the third wave of layoffs of 2026 at Meta. In January, the company eliminated more than 1,000 positions at Reality Labs, closed several virtual reality game studios and cut about 10% of the division. In March, eliminate another 700 employees in at least five divisionsincluding Reality Labs, Facebook social media, recruiting, sales and global operations. The May round is company-wide and is structural rather than performance-based, a distinction Gale’s memo made explicitly. Meta is reorganizing teams to focus on AI”pods” and transferring engineers from across the company to the applied AI organization. New role categories are being created: “AI builder,” “AI Jumper Cable,” and “AI Organization Leader.” The company’s internal language describes the goal as driving “a radical change in engineering productivity and product quality” through “fundamentally reconfigure the way we operate.“
The accumulated toll since 2022 already exceeds 33,000 jobs. Meta cut 11,000 in November 2022, 10,000 in March 2023, 3,600 in January 2025 (framed as performance-based, although employees with positive reviews were caught in the raid), and about 9,700 in the three waves of 2026. The company ended 2025 with 78,865 employees, a year-over-year increase of 6%, having aggressively rehired through 2024 and 2025 after the “original.”year of efficiency“Reductions. It is now cutting more than it rehired. American workers affected by the May round will receive 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks per year of service, and 18 months of health coverage.
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Contrast compensation
Days before the March layoffs, Meta filed disclosures with the SEC revealing a new stock options program tied to reaching a market capitalization of $9 trillion by 2031, about six times its current valuation. The potential payout: up to 921 million dollars each for Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan, and $787 million for Chief Financial Officer Susan Li. Mark Zuckerberg is not included in the plan. The program is modeled after Tesla’s Elon Musk’s compensation structure and is the first such award for Meta since it went public in 2012.
Optics are difficult to defend. Stock-based compensation consumed about 96% of Meta’s $43.6 billion in free cash flow in 2025. Rank-and-file employees have seen reduced stock compensation in recent years as they absorbed successive rounds of layoffs. The message, intended or not, is that the people who survive the cuts will work for less, while the people who direct the cuts will make almost a billion dollars each. The $9 trillion target requires Meta’s market capitalization to grow approximately 35% annually over five years. If the goal is met, the stock appreciation generated by executive payments will have been financed in part by the labor cost reductions produced by layoffs.
The question of surveillance
The layoff announcement came days after a separate revelation that heightened employee anxiety. Meta is installing software on the work computers of American employees under a program called the “Model Capability Initiative,” which Capture keystrokes, mouse movements, and screenshots to train AI agents. Bosworth told employees that “there is no option to cancel this option on the work-issued laptop.” The Register reported that employees protested the program in internal forums. Cornell researchers raised questions about consent and compensation over using employee behavior as AI training data.
The juxtaposition is stark. Meta is asking its remaining employees to generate the training data that will teach the AI systems to replicate computer usage patterns, while also laying off employees whose patterns the AI will eventually replace. Zuckerberg is building a personal AI agent to handle executive information retrieval and coordination, the same type of work traditionally performed by middle management and operational roles. Internal tools called MyClaw and Second Brain are already reshaping the way Meta employees interact with the company’s systems. The trajectory is clear: more AI, fewer people, and the people left will train the AI that makes the next round of people unnecessary.
The industry boss
Meta’s cuts came the same day Microsoft announced its first voluntary retirement program in 51 years, offering buyouts to about 7% of its U.S. workforce. Oracle cut between 20,000 and 30,000 employees in March. Atlassian cut 1,600 and replaced its CTO with two AI-focused executives. The tech sector has seen more than 73,000 job cuts at 95 companies in the first four months of 2026, with projections that the full-year total will exceed the 124,201 eliminated in all of 2025. All major companies cite the AI restructuring as the main driver. The methods differ, Oracle’s was abrupt, Microsoft’s is voluntary, Meta’s is gradual, but the direction is the same: traditional roles exit, AI roles enter, and spending saved on the former is redirected to the latter.
Meta’s fourth-quarter 2025 results, the most recent available, showed $59.89 billion in revenue (up 24%), $22.77 billion in net income and earnings per share of $8.88, beating estimates by 8.4%. Full-year revenue surpassed $200 billion for the first time. First quarter 2026 results will be released on April 29, with revenue forecast between $53.5 billion and $56.5 billion. The company is not cutting back because it is struggling. It’s cutting because it has decided that the quickest path to a $9 trillion valuation is through the artificial intelligence infrastructure, not the 8,000 people it no longer needs. The question that Gale’s memo doesn’t answer, and that no memo from any tech company has answered this year, is what those people are supposed to do next.
