The race to develop the artificial intelligence requires substantial financial resources, and large companies are adapting their structures to support these costs.
Meta announced a drastic reduction of its workforce, with the cut of about 8,000 employees, representing 10% of the workforce total calculated at the start of the year at nearly 79,000.
Beyond the layoffs, which will take effect from May 20, the company has decided to freeze recruitment for 6,000 positions currently open. The need to free up capital to finance the increasingly costly infrastructures related to machine learning and large language models continues to bite.
Meta Lays Off 10% of Its Employees, the Human Cost of AI
The motivations behind this deep reorganization were outlined in an internal communication drafted by Janelle Gale, Chief People Officer of the company.
The executive explained that the staff reduction fits into a broader managerial effort to make the organization more efficient, thereby enabling to balance the heavy investments required by new technologies.
Training and deployment of large-scale models indeed incur enormous costs for data centers, graphics processing units (GPUs) and energy consumption. Added to these are the fierce competition to attract highly specialized engineers and researchers, whose compensation weighs heavily on corporate budgets.
Such financial pressures are forcing Silicon Valley leadership to cut operating costs in other departments.
Automation and New Workflows
The group led by Mark Zuckerberg is concurrently pushing its employees to integrate virtual agents into daily activities, from software writing to content generation, aiming to maximize individual productivity.
This dynamic involves the entire industry; consider that Google has recently stated that 75% of its new code is now generated by automated systems, marking a huge leap from the 25% recorded just two years ago, in 2024.
Previous layoffs at Meta had already hit hard divisions such as Reality Labs, signaling a clear move away from the metaverse-focused strategy in favor of AI-based products. The new cuts expand this restructuring globally, touching a large part of the departments.
Gale acknowledged the strong climate of uncertainty generated by the announcement, noting that publicly leaked rumors have forced the company to advance the official communication ahead of its original plans.
To mitigate the impact on outgoing workers, the company has prepared a transitional support package that includes 16 weeks of base pay for U.S. employees, additional severance calculated based on years of service, extended health coverage and specific professional redeployment services. The formal layoff notices will arrive via email on May 20.
