Meta laid off roughly 700 employees last week across Reality Labs, Facebook, global operations, recruiting and sales. Second round of cuts this year after trimming 10% of Reality Labs in January. The layoffs are directly tied to the AI spending ramp. Meta plans to pour up to $135 billion into AI infrastructure in 2026, nearly double what it spent in 2025.
Internal memos show 65% of engineers are now expected to write more than 75% of their code using AI tools. Reports of a potential 15,000 additional cuts are floating around, though Meta has called those "speculative." The math is pretty clear: headcount down, compute spend up. That is the trade Meta is making.