Summary: Meta is cutting approximately 8,000 employees (10% of its workforce) beginning 20 May, cancelling 6,000 open roles, and planning additional cuts for H2 2026. The layoffs, announced via an internal memo from HR head Janelle Gale, are structural rather than performance-based, reorganising teams into AI-focused “pods” while Meta spends $115-135 billion on AI infrastructure this year. The cuts arrive alongside executive stock options worth up to $921 million each and a workplace surveillance programme capturing employee keystrokes to train AI agents.

Meta told employees on Wednesday that it will cut approximately 8,000 jobs, roughly 10% of its global workforce, beginning on 20 May. The company is also cancelling 6,000 open requisitions it had planned to fill, bringing the effective headcount reduction to 14,000 positions. Additional cuts are planned for the second half of the year, though their timing and scope have not been finalised. If the second wave matches the first, Meta will have eliminated roughly 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’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,” Gale wrote. “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.”

The investments she is referring to cost between $115 billion and $135 billion this year alone. That is Meta’s guided capital expenditure for 2026, a 73% increase over the $72.2 billion it spent in 2025, nearly all of it directed at AI infrastructure. The company is building Prometheus, a one-gigawatt AI supercluster in Ohio coming online this year, and Hyperion, a 2,250-acre, $10 billion facility in Louisiana capable of five gigawatts. It hired Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI chief executive, as its first chief AI officer in June 2025 through a deal that included a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. It is poaching elite AI talent with packages worth up to $1.5 billion for a single engineer. The people being hired are not the same people being fired. That is the point.

The rolling layoffs

The May cuts are the third wave of 2026 layoffs at Meta. In January, the company eliminated more than 1,000 positions in Reality Labs, shutting down several VR game studios and cutting roughly 10% of the division. In March, it cut another 700 employees across at least five divisions, including Reality Labs, Facebook social, recruiting, sales, and global operations. The May round is company-wide and structural rather than performance-based, a distinction Gale’s memo made explicitly. Meta is reorganising teams into AI-focused “pods” and transferring engineers from across the company into the Applied AI organisation. New role categories are being created: “AI builder,” “AI pod lead,” and “AI org lead.” The company’s internal language describes the goal as driving “a step change in engineering productivity and product quality” through “fundamentally rewiring how we operate.”

The cumulative toll since 2022 now 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, though employees with positive reviews were caught in the sweep), and approximately 9,700 across the three 2026 waves. The company ended 2025 with 78,865 employees, up 6% year over year, having rehired aggressively through 2024 and 2025 after the original “year of efficiency” reductions. It is now cutting deeper than it rehired. US 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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The compensation contrast

Days before the March layoffs, Meta filed SEC disclosures revealing a new stock option programme tied to reaching a $9 trillion market capitalisation by 2031, roughly six times its current valuation. The potential payout: up to $921 million 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 programme is modelled after Tesla’s Elon Musk compensation structure and is Meta’s first such award since going public in 2012.

The optics are difficult to defend. Stock-based compensation consumed approximately 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 while absorbing successive layoff rounds. The message, whether intended or not, is that the people who survive the cuts will work for less while the people who direct the cuts stand to make nearly a billion dollars each. The $9 trillion target requires Meta’s market capitalisation to grow at roughly 35% annually for five years. If the target is met, the stock appreciation that generates the executive payouts will have been funded in part by the labour cost reductions that the layoffs produce.

The surveillance question

The layoff announcement arrived days after a separate disclosure that sharpened employee anxiety. Meta is installing software on US employees’ work computers under a programme called the “Model Capability Initiative,” which captures keystrokes, mouse movements, and screenshots to train AI agents. Bosworth told employees that “there is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop.” The Register reported that employees protested the programme on internal forums. Cornell researchers raised consent and compensation questions about using employee behaviour as AI training data.

The juxtaposition is stark. Meta is asking its remaining employees to generate the training data that will teach AI systems to replicate computer-use patterns, while simultaneously laying off the employees whose patterns the AI will eventually replace. Zuckerberg is building a personal AI agent to handle executive information retrieval and coordination, the same kind of work that middle-management and operational roles traditionally perform. Internal tools called MyClaw and Second Brain are already reshaping how Meta employees interact with the company’s systems. The trajectory is clear: more AI, fewer people, and the people who remain will train the AI that makes the next round of people unnecessary.

The industry pattern

Meta’s cuts landed on the same day Microsoft announced its first voluntary retirement programme in 51 years, offering buyouts to roughly 7% of its US workforce. Oracle eliminated 20,000 to 30,000 employees in March. Atlassian cut 1,600 and replaced its CTO with two AI-focused executives. The tech sector has recorded more than 73,000 job cuts across 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. Every major company cites AI restructuring as the primary driver. The methods differ, Oracle’s was abrupt, Microsoft’s is voluntary, Meta’s is phased, but the direction is the same: traditional roles out, AI roles in, and the spending saved on the former redirected to the latter.

Meta’s Q4 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 crossed $200 billion for the first time. Q1 2026 results are due on 29 April, with revenue guidance of $53.5 billion to $56.5 billion. The company is not cutting because it is struggling. It is cutting because it has decided that the fastest path to a $9 trillion valuation runs through AI infrastructure, not through the 8,000 people it no longer needs. The question that Gale’s memo does not answer, and that no memo from any tech company this year has answered, is what those people are supposed to do next.