Meta cuts hundreds of employees while continuing to ramp up AI investments

BlockBeats message, April 3, according to the New York Post, Meta is laying off several hundred employees in Silicon Valley. At the same time, this tech giant is making large-scale investments in artificial intelligence and is considering cutting more than 20% of its total employee count. According to the latest state government filing documents, this Facebook parent company will lay off nearly 200 employees in the San Francisco Bay Area. The layoffs will affect 124 employees in Burlingame, California, and 74 employees in nearby Sunnyvale. According to the documents, these layoffs will take effect in late May, and all affected positions will be permanently eliminated.

Experts say this move indicates that Meta is undergoing a major strategic shift—moving from an operations model dominated by large numbers of people to a machine-driven system. Meta’s recent AI-related plans include investing $10 billion in El Paso, Texas, to build a data center.

Meta is also considering even more substantial layoffs. Senior employees have been told to prepare for layoffs that could affect more than 20% of the company’s employees—about 15,000 employees. Regarding this plan, a Meta spokesperson said, “This is a speculative report about a theoretical proposal.”

If the layoffs go through, they would be Meta’s largest round of layoffs since 2022 and 2023, when Zuckerberg pushed the company’s “efficiency year,” during which more than 20,000 employees were laid off. During a Meta earnings call, Zuckerberg said that, due to the adoption of AI tools, Meta has started “seeing that projects that used to require large teams can now be done by one very talented person.”