Meta plans to lay off up to 20 percent of its workforce — roughly 15,800 people — according to sources cited by Reuters and reported by The Verge's Terrence O'Brien on March 14, 2026. The rationale is direct: cut payroll to fund accelerating AI spending on data centers, compute infrastructure, and competitive compensation for AI researchers.
The scale echoes what Meta did in the period CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the "year of efficiency." Between November 2022 and early 2023, the company eliminated about 22,000 positions. The current round would be comparable in raw numbers and larger as a share of a workforce that has since been rebuilt and trimmed.
What's changed is where the money goes. Meta spent years and billions on the Metaverse — building VR hardware, acquiring studios, rebranding the company itself around a bet that virtual reality would define the next computing platform. That bet is largely shelved. Studios have been closed, VR budgets cut, and the redirected capital is flowing into generative AI and large language models — a domain where Meta is competing directly with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic for talent and research output. <a href="/news/2026-03-14-atlassian-cuts-1-600-jobs-in-ai-pivot-amid-years-of-losses">The pattern is industry-wide, with companies like Atlassian making comparable cuts to fund AI investment</a>.
The shift hasn't insulated the company from criticism. Its AI-powered smart glasses, chatbot deployments, and the documented effects of its social platforms on teenagers have drawn regulatory scrutiny and sustained press attention. None of it has altered the spending trajectory.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company's next earnings call will be the first chance for Zuckerberg to detail where the cuts land and how the freed capital gets allocated — including whether any of it goes toward further acquisitions in the AI space.