Facebook’s parent company has begun notifying workers around the world that they are out of a job, as developers and product teams grapple with a 10 percent cut designed to cut $145bn in spending on intelligence.
Meta Platforms began handing out layoff notices Wednesday morning, kicking off the most aggressive restructuring in Silicon Valley this year. Up to 8,000 roles, about a tenth of the company’s global headcount, are expected to disappear as Mark Zuckerberg transforms the business into an AI-first place.
The cuts are concentrated in the engineering and products divisions of the company, according to a Bloomberg report, about 350 jobs in Dublin, Meta’s European headquarters, to go. The Irish capital has long been a critical hub for the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, hosting thousands of employees working for clients across the EMEA region.
Even before the layoff letters landed, the wheels of internal change were already in motion. On Monday, about 7,000 employees were told to be redeployed to newly created teams charged with developing AI products, agents and assistants that will be included in the Meta family of applications.
“We are now at a stage where many orgs can operate in a lean structure with smaller pods/cohorts that can move faster and have more ownership,” wrote Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, in an internal memo seen by employees this week.
A $145bn bet on ‘personal superintelligence’
The job losses come as Meta pours unprecedented sums into data centers, chips and engineering talent it believes will define the next decade of computing. In its latest quarterly results, the company told investors that it will spend up to $145bn in capital spending this year, more than double the $72bn it spent in 2025.
Where rivals such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are harnessing the power of AI in cloud services they can sell to corporate customers, Mr Zuckerberg is taking a different approach. Meta’s founder is pursuing what he calls “personal superintelligence” – an AI assistant built specifically to live inside Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the company’s growing line of glasses and headsets.
Meta’s Muse Spark model, released in April, is the first major product from its Superintelligence Labs division, which was founded last June and is staffed by freelancers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
That spending spooked investors and weighed on the stock price. Meta’s stock is down 8.4 percent so far this year, while the broader Nasdaq is down 12.5 percent, a split that, as Business Matters reported after the first quarter results, reflects growing concern over the lack of a direct cash flow linked to Meta’s AI bill. When pressed for a return on investment spending, Mr Zuckerberg told analysts on a Q1 earnings call that it was “a very technical question”, a line that did little to calm nerves on Wall Street.
A broader AI-driven shake-up in technology
Meta is not alone in trying to take efficiency away from its employees while throwing money at AI. Intuit, the American owner of QuickBooks and TurboTax, is preparing to lay off about 17 percent of its workforce, or about 3,000 workers. Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare and Jack Dorsey’s payments group Block have all announced major rounds of layoffs this year, with Amazon’s demand for 16,000 jobs framed by CEO Andy Jassy as a way to “de-clutter”.
According to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs in the tech sector, more than 140 companies have laid off more than 111,000 workers so far this year, already closing in on a record 124,636 cuts by 2025.
For UK small and medium-sized businesses, the message from the world’s most important technology companies is unmistakable. Money that was once funded by sprawling product teams is now being redirected to infrastructure, models and a much smaller pool of older developers. As giants like McKinsey similarly cut their positions, British SME owners weighing their AI strategies face an uncomfortable question: are they investing too quickly to keep up, or are they being lured into an expensive arms race they can’t win?
Meta and Intuit were contacted for comment.
