Meta Plans To Layoff 16,000 Workers As Company Looks To Leverage AI To Cut Costs

Marck Zuckerberg’s Meta is planning a layoff of a significant part of its workforce amid the organisation’s pivot to AI (artificial intelligence) focused products.

The owner of social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram wants to manage rising operational costs and improve efficiency through AI-driven automation.

The layoff could affect as much as 20 percent of the company’s 79,000 employees globally. That is, almost 16,000 workers may be asked to leave, according to a report by Reuters.

The company wants to leverage AI in offsetting the rising cost of developing infrastructure for the technology. However, there was no clarity on the timeline of the layoffs and the magnitude of the actual job cuts, the report said citing sources.

If the company goes ahead with letting go of 20 percent of the workforce then it could be Meta’s most significant restructuring exercise after the post-pandemic cleaning cycle of 2022 and 2023.

During that period, touted as the “year of efficiency”, the company laid off a total of 21,000 workers. While about 11,000 (around 13 percent of its workforce at the time) staffers were let go in November 2022, another 10,000 jobs were cut in the second tranche four months later.

Since about a year, the focus of Meta’s chief executive Zuckerberg has diverted to generative AI. It has plans to invest about $600 billion on data centres by 2028.

Meta has been hiring top AI talent for the last couple of years. It has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to poach top AI researchers to its new superintelligence team.

Recently, it acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents. According to a report by Reuters, Meta will acquire Chinese AI startup Manus for $2 billion.

Technology companies have been cutting jobs after the rise of AI. In January, Amazon cut close to 16,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its workforce. Last month, Jack Dorsey’s fintech startup Block fired nearly half of its staff.