Mark Zuckerberg blames AI spending spree for Meta layoffs

2 min readUpdated May 1, 2026

Meta $META CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees Thursday that the company's planned layoffs stem from a surge in AI capital spending, and declined to rule out additional job cuts beyond those already announced.

Speaking at a company town hall — his first direct address to staff since the layoffs were confirmed — Zuckerberg framed the reductions as a consequence of competing budget pressures, according to Reuters. "We basically have two major cost centers in the company: compute infrastructure and people-oriented things," he said. "If we're investing more in one area to serve our community, then that means we have less capital to allocate to the other. So that means we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat."

CFO Susan Li struck a similarly uncertain tone in a recent earnings call, noting that accelerating shifts in AI make it impossible to forecast the company's ideal headcount. Fox Business reported her remarks.

The roughly 8,000 positions being eliminated starting May 20 represent about 10% of Meta's global workforce. Further cuts are expected in the second half of the year, though no dates or scope have been set for those rounds. Among the units facing reductions in May are Reality Labs, recruiting, sales, global operations, and the Facebook social division. Meta employed almost 79,000 people as of the end of last year.

The spending driving those reductions is substantial. To fund its AI buildout — covering data centers, GPUs, and the underlying infrastructure for its models — Meta has projected 2026 capital expenditures of between $115 billion and $135 billion, about twice what it spent in 2025.

The town hall also came amid internal tension over a separate initiative. Separately, Reuters has reported that Meta launched a program to capture data on how workers use their computers — logging cursor activity, keystrokes, and navigation patterns — as training material for its AI systems, a decision that drew sharp pushback from staff on internal forums.

Meta's headcount has been cut sharply before. This is not the first time Meta has moved aggressively on headcount — two waves of reductions in 2022 and 2023 shed more than 20,000 positions combined, part of a period Zuckerberg branded the "Year of Efficiency" after pandemic-era overhiring and a steep stock decline.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's layoffs are driven by surging AI spending. And he won't rule out more cuts

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