Meta is cutting 8,000 jobs and canceling 6,000 open roles as a $135B AI spend reshapes the company from the inside out.

Summary: Meta is cutting about 8,000 employees (10% of its workforce) as of May 20, canceling 6,000 open roles, and planning additional cuts for H2 2026. The layoffs, announced in an internal memo from HR head Janelle Gale, are systematic rather than performance-based, reorganizing AI teams into AI. $115-135 billion in AI infrastructure this year. The cuts come along with executive stock options worth $921 million each and an on-the-job monitoring program that captures employees’ keys to train AI agents.

Meta told workers on Wednesday that it will cut about 8,000 jobs, about 10% of its global workforce, effective May 20. The company is also canceling 6,000 open applications it had planned to fill, bringing the number of applicants down to 14,000. Further cuts are planned for the second half of the year, although their timing and scope have not yet been finalized. If the second wave is anything like the first, Meta will have fired about 20% of its workforce before 2026. The memo announcing the cuts was written by Mrs. Janelle Gale, the Head of Human Resources at Meta, who said the announcement came early because the information had been leaked. “We do this as part of our ongoing effort to run the company more efficiently and allow us to reduce other investments we make.,” Gale wrote.This is not an easy trade and will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to the Meta during their time here.“

The investment he is talking about is worth between $115 billion and $135 billion this year alone. That’s the amount Meta is spending in 2026, a 73% increase over the $72.2 billion spent in 2025, almost all of which is directed toward AI infrastructure. The company is building Prometheus, a gigawatt AI supercluster in Ohio that is coming online this year, and Hyperion, a 2,250-acre, $10 billion facility in Louisiana capable of generating five gigawatts. It hired Alexandr Wang, the former chief executive of Scale AI, as its first chief AI officer in June 2025 in a deal that included a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Corner the ability to hunt elite AI in packages worth up to $1.5 billion for one developer. People who are hired are not the same as those who are fired. That’s the point.

Flexible layoffs

The May cuts are the third wave of layoffs in 2026 at Meta. In January, the company eliminated more than 1,000 positions at Reality Labs, shuttered several VR game studios and cut about 10 percent of the division. In March, it cut another 700 employees in at least five divisions, including Reality Labs, Facebook social, recruiting, sales, and global operations. May’s round is company-wide and structural rather than performance-based, Gale’s memo made clear. Meta reorganizes teams in AI focused “pods” and transferring engineers from across the company to the Applied AI organization. New role categories are being created: “AI Builder,” “AI pod lead,” and “AI org leads.” The company’s internal language describes the mission as driving “a step change in engineering productivity and product quality” through “reinventing the way we work.“

The growing number from 2022 is now more than 33,000 jobs. Meta is laying off 11,000 in November 2022, 10,000 in March 2023, 3,600 in January 2025 (structured as performance-based, although employees with good reviews are caught in the sweeps), and about 9,700 in all three waves of 2026. The company ended 2025 with 78,865 employees, up 6% year-on-year, and rehired in 2024 and 2025 after starting “year of efficiencyUS workers affected by the May round will receive 16 weeks of pay and two additional weeks per work year, as well as 18 months of health coverage.

Compensation differential

Days before the layoff in March, Meta filed an SEC filing disclosing a new stock option plan tied to reaching a market capitalization of $9 trillion by 2031, nearly six times its current valuation. Possible payment: up to $921 million each 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 program. The plan is modeled on Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation structure and is Meta’s first award since it went public in 2012.

Optics are difficult to protect. Stock-based compensation accounted for nearly 96% of Meta’s $43.6 billion in free cash flow by 2025. Position workers have seen a reduction in stock compensation in recent years while enduring successive rounds of layoffs. The message, whether intended or not, is that the people who survive the cuts will work less while the people who direct the cuts stand to make about a billion dollars each. The $9 trillion target requires the Meta market capitalization to grow at around 35% per year for five years. If the target is met, the stock appreciation that produces the higher payouts will be partially funded by the reduction in labor costs generated by the layoffs.

It’s a surveillance question

The layoff announcement came days after separate revelations fueled employee concerns. Meta installs software on the work computers of US employees under a program 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 log out of this on your work-provided laptop.” The Register reported that workers protested the plan in internal forums. Cornell researchers have raised questions of consent and compensation about using employee behavior as data for AI training.

The juxtaposition is clear. Meta is asking its remaining employees to generate training data that will teach AI systems to replicate computing patterns, while at the same time demolishing employees whose patterns will eventually be replaced by AI. Zuckerberg is building a personal AI agent managing high-level information retrieval and communication, the same type of work performed by middle management and operational roles in general. Internal tools called MyClaw and Second Brain are already reshaping the way Meta employees interact with company systems. The trajectory is clear: more AI, fewer humans, and the remaining humans will train the AI ​​that makes the next round of humans unnecessary.

Industry pattern

Meta’s cuts came the same day Microsoft announced its first voluntary retirement plan in 51 years, offering buyouts to about 7% of its US workforce. Oracle cut 20,000 to 30,000 jobs in March. Atlassian has cut 1,600 jobs and replaced its CTO with two AI-focused executives. The technology sector recorded more than 73,000 job cuts at 95 companies in the first four months of 2026, with predictions that the full-year total will exceed 124,201 laid off in 2025. Every major company cites AI restructuring as a key driver. The methods are different, Oracle’s was by accident, Microsoft went voluntarily, Meta is divided into categories, but the direction is the same: traditional roles, AI roles, and costs saved in the former are 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 revenue, and earnings per share of $8.88, beating estimates by 8.4%. Annual revenue exceeded 200 billion for the first time. Q1 2026 results are due on April 29, with revenue guidance of $53.5 billion to $56.5 billion. The company is not cutting because it is struggling. It’s tight because it decided the fastest way to scale $9 trillion is through AI infrastructure, not 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, is what those people should do next.