This came as he confirmed the company would cut around 8,000 jobs, roughly 10% of its global workforce beginning May 20, with further redundancies signalled for the second half of the year.

Speaking at an internal town hall, the Meta chief executive made clear that surging AI infrastructure costs, not AI-driven efficiency gains, are the driving force behind the cuts. “If we’re investing more in one area to serve our community, then that means we have less capital to allocate to the other. So that means we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat,” he told staff, in comments heard by Reuters.

Zuckerberg was explicit that internal AI adoption was not to blame. “Getting everyone internally to use AI tools and getting to do the work more efficiently is not the thing that’s driving layoffs,” he said, though he declined to rule out additional cuts, adding the company would “be able to share more soon.”

The scale of Meta’s AI capital commitment explains the pressure. The company has guided for AI-related capital expenditure of between $115 billion and $135 billion in 2026, nearly double its 2025 spending as it races to expand data centre capacity and GPU infrastructure for its Meta Superintelligence Labs initiative.

Chief financial officer Susan Li has acknowledged Meta remains “capacity constrained,” with demand for compute outpacing supply.

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