Zuckerberg reportedly trades headcount for compute as Meta readies to cut 10 percent of its workforce to fund AI infrastructure

Meta is preparing major layoffs to offset soaring AI costs. Reuters sources say the company will cut about 8,000 jobs on May 20, roughly 10 percent of its global workforce, with a second round planned for later this year. In total, more than 20 percent of jobs could go, Reuters reported in March. Meta declined to comment.

The cuts come as CEO Mark Zuckerberg sinks hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure and pushes to flatten hierarchies and lean on AI-assisted employees. Meta recently reorganized its Reality Labs teams and spun up a new "Applied AI" unit to build autonomous AI agents.

Meta is also back in the frontier model race but still playing catch-up. Its new "Muse Spark" is a natively multimodal reasoning model with tool use, visual chain-of-thought, and multi-agent orchestration—state of the art in architecture but still trailing Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI on benchmarks. It's also the first such model Meta isn't releasing as open weights, keeping it locked to its own products and a private API.