Mark Zuckerberg has made his choice. The Meta Platforms CEO is staking enormous resources on artificial intelligence — and he appears ready to fund part of that pivot by cutting deep into the company’s workforce.
According to exclusive reporting by Reuters published on March 14, 2026, Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of its staff. Top executives have reportedly signaled the plans to other senior leaders and instructed them to begin planning how to pare back. With 79,000 employees on record as of December 31, 2025, a 20% reduction would translate to nearly 16,000 job losses.
Meta pushed back on the report. Company spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed it as “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”
Funding a $135 Billion Bet
The rationale behind the potential restructuring is as much financial as strategic. In its Q4 2025 earnings call in January 2026, Meta CFO Susan Li announced projected full-year capital expenditure of between $115 billion and $135 billion — up from $72.22 billion in 2025 — driven by investments in the company’s Meta Superintelligence Labs and core business. In one year, Meta’s investment spending would nearly double.
On the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described 2026 as a “big year” for Meta’s AI ambitions, framing “personal superintelligence” — machines eventually capable of surpassing human cognition — as central to the company’s long-term strategy.
To fund that programme, the company is looking to reduce its payroll. The potential cuts come as Meta ramps up spending on AI infrastructure, acquisitions, and hiring in the field of artificial intelligence. The group has already acquired AI startups including Moltbook, a social network built for AI agents, and Manus, focused on AI agents for task automation.
A Restructuring in Continuity
The potential layoffs would not emerge out of thin air. Earlier in 2026, Meta had already targeted roughly 1,000 employees in its Reality Labs division. In 2025, the company carried out a broader round of cuts affecting approximately 5% of its workforce.
If Meta settles on the 20% figure, it would represent its most significant restructuring since the so-called “year of efficiency” of late 2022 and early 2023, when the company eliminated 11,000 jobs in November 2022 and cut another 10,000 positions months later.
The “AI Washing” Debate
Meta’s move is part of a broader pattern across the technology sector, where artificial intelligence has become the default rationale for workforce reductions. By March 2026, tech layoffs in the United States had already reached 45,000 for the month alone, with more than 9,200 positions explicitly attributed to AI and automation.
Yet the narrative is under scrutiny. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly acknowledged the existence of “AI washing” — companies blaming AI for layoffs they would have carried out regardless: “There’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs.” In January 2026, the US recorded 108,435 job cuts — the highest monthly figure since 2009 — yet AI was explicitly cited in only around 7,600 of those cases.
What Is at Stake
For Meta, the equation appears straightforward: the company intends to direct the bulk of its 2026 spending toward expanding Meta Superintelligence Labs, buying more GPUs, developing custom chips, and building new data centres. Analysts estimate the company’s capex intensity could reach between 55% and 67% of projected revenue in 2026 — a ratio unprecedented among profitable technology companies.
The question now is not whether Meta will proceed with cuts, but whether the broader industry can sustain the logic that massive layoffs are justified by AI productivity gains that remain, for now, largely unmeasured.
M&B
