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Meta Shares were rising before U.S. markets opened on Thursday after reports the company planned to lay off more than 20% of its workforce to accommodate this year’s staggering AI spending plans.
The timing and details of the layoffs have not yet been finalized, but executives at the tech giant have told executives to come up with a layoff plan, three anonymous people familiar with the matter told Reuters in a story published on Saturday. The company’s shares were last up 2.7% in premarket trading at 6:16 a.m. ET, after falling nearly 4% on Sunday.
Meta employed approximately 79,000 people as of December 2025, and the scale of the layoffs described could affect more than 15,000 employees. This is the biggest job reduction since late 2022, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was cutting 11,000 jobs and hiring as part of a broader cost-cutting strategy.
“This is speculative reporting regarding a theoretical approach,” a Mehta spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC on Monday.
Meta’s layoffs are likely to continue as tech giants focus on building out expensive AI infrastructure and improving efficiency through AI integrated into workflows.
Several companies have already revealed plans for large-scale AI-related layoffs in 2026. Jack Dorsey’s block The company announced in February that it would lay off 4,000 employees in order to “use AI to automate more tasks so we can move faster with smaller, better teams.”
meanwhile, Amazon It cut 16,000 roles in January in an effort to reduce hierarchy and bureaucracy amid plans to invest heavily in AI.
So far in 2026, more than 12,000 U.S. jobs will be cut because of AI, according to the latest data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
AI spending reaches $135 billion
Meta revealed in its fourth-quarter earnings report in January that AI-related capital spending this year will be in the range of $115 billion to $135 billion, roughly double the amount it spent building a new AI division in 2025.
This is part of a total of $700 billion in hyperscaler technology, including: Amazon, alphabetand microsoftare planning to invest in AI this year.
The plans have raised concerns among some investors that spending could become unsustainable when compared to the revenue generated by AI.
Zuckerberg said 2026 will be a big year for AI, as the company’s investments focus on his mission to “build a personal superintelligence.”
Last year, the company invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. Meta eventually poached the group’s CEO, Alexander Wang, and some of his top engineers and researchers.
“We’ve seen significant layoffs at companies like Block, which laid off 40% of its workforce ‘because of AI,’ but if Meta intends to reduce its workforce at this scale while increasing its investment in AI, we think it signals a broader shift. AI is increasingly driving productivity,” Jefferies analysts said in a note on Sunday.
“This has important implications not just for the meta, but across the broader internet/software landscape as investors reconsider the relationship between headcount, growth and profits…These reductions are clearly being considered as part of an effort to offset rising AI infrastructure costs with a significant increase in AI-driven capital spending,” they added.
