Meta has announced it will cut 10% of its staff. What is it freeing up funds for?

Meta announced massive layoffs: about 8,000 people - about 10% of its total workforce - will be affected, according to an internal memo HR Director Janelle Gale sent to employees on Thursday, Bloomberg reports. The company will also close 6,000 positions it had planned to fill. "We are doing this to operate more efficiently and to offset other investments," Gale explained in the memo.

We are talking about giant spending on artificial intelligence, the agency notes. Meta in its latest financial report reported an increase in investments in AI infrastructure: this year they will be from $115 billion to $135 billion. The company's head Mark Zuckerberg is actively spending on human resources and infrastructure needed to develop advanced AI products, including large language models and chatbots. Meta has also closed several multi-billion dollar deals in the artificial intelligence space over the past few months.

The company had already cut 5% of its employees at the beginning of 2025, however, at the time it claimed it would hire new ones - replacing those laid off due to poor performance. According to CNBC, about 1,000 people from the Reality Labs division of Meta, which dealt with the meta-universe, left Meta then, and in March another round of layoffs took place, affecting employees of Facebook and Reality Labs again.

Meta shares fell 2.3% at the end of trading on April 23 - stronger than the broad market. Since the beginning of the year, the company's value is down 0.4%, while the S&P 500 index is up 3.7%.

66 out of 73 analysts tracking these securities recommend buying them. The remaining seven advise holding them in a portfolio.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor