Investing in AI, Not People
Meta Reportingly Firing a Vast Percentage of Its Staff in Zuckerberg’s Move to AI
The company is looking to spend up to $135 billion on AI this year alone.
Published Mar 16, 2026 11:16 AM EDT
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made headlines last year by offering mind-boggling job offers to top AI talent. One of these come-ons reportedly breached $1 billion — a borderline absurd sum that ended up being declined.
Still, the millennial CEO has had a hard time building out an AI team he’s happy with, laying off rounds of AI developers after the hiring spree. His relationship with AI head Alexandr Wang has also grown tense as of late, with sources telling the Financial Times in December that he finds Zuckerberg’s micromanagement to be suffocating.
Meanwhile, the expenses for Meta’s enormous spending commitments to build out AI infrastructure are continuing to balloon, leaving the company with major bills to pay. The company is projected to spend up to $135 billion in AI-related expenses in 2026 alone.
Now, as inside sources told Reuters, the company is planning to conduct yet another round of sweeping layoffs that could affect an astonishing 20 percent or more of the company — one of the clearest signs yet that Meta is prioritizing big bets on AI over employing humans who Zuckerberg believes will soon be made redundant by the tech anyway.
Zuckerberg has made it clear he’s looking for labor efficiency in the age of AI, arguing that “we’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” earlier this year.
The company didn’t outright deny Reuters‘ reporting, but cast doubt on the purported plans, which would affect upward of 15,000 workers.
“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told the news agency.
If confirmed, it could be one of the company’s biggest rounds of layoffs in history. In 2022, it laid off 11,000 employees. In early 2023, Zuckerberg announced a “year of efficiency,” cutting 10,000 more jobs.
The cuts don’t appear to be a sign that Meta is struggling to find funding. The company is planning to spend a whopping $600 billion to build AI data centers by 2028. The company has also been on a shopping spree, buying a Reddit-like site populated by AI bots, called Moltbook, last week — and a Chinese AI startup called Manus for $2 billion to $3 billion.
Investors are also optimistic. Following the latest news, the company’s shares surged almost three percent when trading resumed on Monday.
The rumored layoffs are part of a much greater trend in the tech industry, with companies including Elon Musk’s xAI, Australian software company Atlassian, and Amazon cutting thousands of positions this month alone.
Block CEO and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey fired a particularly loud warning shot late last month, announcing his fintech company would be cutting almost half of its staff. Provocatively, Dorsey cited “intelligence tools” that were creating a “new way of working” with smaller teams. His missive once again stoked fears of an imminent — or perhaps ongoing — AI jobs apocalypse, a massive shake-up that has economists on edge.
Whether Meta will be able to keep up as the heated AI race continues remains to be seen. The company’s efforts, including its Llama 4 models, have failed to impress, and it was forced to push back the release of its latest AI model, code-named Avocado, because its performance is still falling short of competing ones from the likes of Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
“As we’ve said publicly, our next model will be good but, more importantly, show the rapid trajectory we’re on,” Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold told the New York Times, and “then we’ll steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models.”
“We’re excited for people to see what we’ve been cooking very soon,” he added.
Zuckerberg has also tried to undercut ongoing reporting that his relationship with Wang has soured, posting a selfie of himself and his company’s AI lead sheepishly smiling into the camera last week.
But given the company’s fight for relevancy, there’s clearly a very different story playing out behind those beaming faces.
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Victor Tangermann
Senior Editor
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
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