Meta Cuts 8,000 Jobs, Cancels 6,000 Hires While Budgeting Up to $135 Billion for AI

Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 roles in May — about 10% of its workforce — and scrapped plans to fill 6,000 open positions, while earmarking $115 billion to $135 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, nearly double the $72 billion it spent in 2025.

The canceled openings equal three-quarters of the actual dismissals. The math shows a company shrinking both the payroll it carries today and the one it once meant to build.

The company also cut approximately 600 jobs from its newly formed AI Superintelligence Labs on October 22. That came just months after Meta spent $14.3 billion to acquire a stake in Scale AI and recruit its founder, Alexandr Wang, as chief AI officer.

Where the cuts landed

The May reductions hit non-AI product and support teams hardest, including parts of integrity and cybersecurity staff. An earlier round in March removed about 700 people from Reality Labs, social media and recruiting teams. Meta also reportedly set a late-May exit date for roughly 200 Bay Area workers.

About 7,000 existing employees were reassigned to AI-related work — a figure the company stresses should not be added to the layoff total. In France, a local voluntary-departure plan could affect up to 100 of 300 staff, mainly in sales. Meta has not publicly commented on the French restructuring reports.

What does the $135 billion buy?

Meta has told investors it is preparing a data-center build-out that could approach $600 billion through 2028. The 2026 capex range, disclosed during the year and later revised, covers servers, compute capacity, networking gear and power for data centers.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants smaller teams producing more with AI tools. In January, he claimed projects that once needed big teams were being done by single talented people.

Yet Meta's own AI products have stumbled. The Llama 4 release last year drew criticism for misleading benchmark results, and the largest version, Behemoth, was abandoned. The Superintelligence Labs' new model, Avocado, has also lagged expectations. Zuckerberg recently told employees the 2026 spending surge has not yet delivered the payoff he promised.

Why are investors worried?

Semiconductor stocks sold off sharply in November, with AMD and Arm each down more than 20% on the month. KeyBanc Capital Markets analysts flagged mounting investor questions over Meta's spending levels against unclear returns.

Unlike Microsoft, Amazon and Google, Meta generates no meaningful revenue from AI products. Its cloud peers can point to AI compute already billed to customers; Meta cannot. The advertising business remains strong — Q3 2026 revenue reached about $63.06 billion, up 26% year over year — but that growth has not prevented the cuts.

What is happening inside the company?

A Reuters investigation reported in late summer that Meta studied scenarios cutting certain teams by up to 60% as part of a push toward an "AI native" organization. That hypothesis was not a final plan and did not apply company-wide. Zuckerberg reportedly abandoned a second global wave of layoffs considered for November, after earlier saying he did not expect further company-wide cuts in 2026.

Legal pressure is building too. In July, 26 U.S. employees filed a legal action alleging Meta used internal AI tools to evaluate performance and help identify workers for layoff. They claim the criteria penalized people who had taken protected leave. Meta disputes the allegations and says staffing decisions are made by people, not AI. The claims are not judicially established.

What remains unclear

How much of the $115–135 billion capex has actually been committed versus budgeted is not broken out in the available reporting. The extent to which reassigned staff are filling AI roles versus backfilling other gaps is also unspecified.

The bet now rests on execution. Meta is spending at nearly double last year's pace while its flagship models trail expectations — and its CEO has already conceded the returns have not arrived.