Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is planning to slash around 10 percent of its workforce in May as the company moves to ramp up its AI integration. This round of layoffs is estimated to cut around 8,000 employees from Meta’s global workforce. While the news is already causing concern in the industry, company officials have reportedly informed the teams that the lay-off numbers could infact go even higher.
Janelle Gale, the chief people officer at Meta, held a meeting with the staff members on Thursday. During the meeting, she was met with the question if the company could announce more layoffs later in the year.
“I’d love to say that there are no more layoffs, but I can’t say something we can’t deliver,” Gale said during the meeting,” Gale was quoted as saying.
In the first quarter of 2026, Meta reported strong results. It clocked a 33 percent YoY spike in its revenue between January and March this year — bagging $56.3 billion in revenue.
Despite the profits, Meta shares had witnessed a notable drop of nearly 10 percent this week. The reason was Meta’s plans to increase its spending on building AI infrastructure, dampening expectations of short-term profits. Meta’s AI spending could hit as high as $145 billion, which may not show big financial returns for the years to come, the same way its Metaverse ambitions witnessed visible loss-laden setbacks these past years.
According to reports, Gale told Meta employees that market priorities are rapidly evolving and that the company will have to take steps to stay at par with the intensifying competitions.
“While the business is strong, priorities change, competition is fierce, and we will continue to manage our costs responsibly,” she reportedly stated.
Meta staffers have been flooding the anonymous online workplace forum called Blind with sharp criticism around the company replacing human resources with AI at an increasingly rapid pace.
As per Blind data, the negative sentiment among Meta employees has risen by 300 percent between 2024 and 2025. Last year, it reached 83 percent. The company is being labelled “dead and depressing” on the platform.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg is looking to create a lot more apps as AI shifts the momentum of workflow in the Menlo Park, California-headquartered company.
Last year, Meta made it to the headlines repeatedly for poaching AI talent from contemporaries with absurdly high salary packages reaching as high as $1 billion. These hirings were part of Zuckerberg’s ambition of creating “Superintelligence” — which he believes would be the next, more advanced iteration of the present AI technology.
To facilitate the computational and technical requirements for Superintelligence, Meta has already started creating multiple multi-Gigawatt (GW) clusters — the first of which named “Prometheus” is scheduled to go live in sometime this year.
Zuckerberg himself is reportedly working on creating an agentic AI co-CEO to help him smoothen day-to-day operations and internal communication at Meta.
Earlier in January, Meta had announced 1,500 job cuts within its Metaverse-focussed Reality Labs unit as it planned to scale back Metaverse initiatives and redirect resources to AI efforts.