Meta launched a new round of global layoffs on May 20, 2026, cutting approximately 8,000 positions, which accounts for about 10% of its total workforce. This is the largest structural adjustment since 2026, with layoffs starting in three waves from 4 AM local time.

This adjustment also cancels about 6,000 planned recruitment positions, while another 7,000 employees are reassigned to AI-related work lines. The affected areas include the Integrity team, cybersecurity team, and content design department. U.S. employees will receive a severance package of 16 weeks' pay plus an additional 2 weeks for each year of service. Reports indicate that the median annual salary for employees has decreased by about $30,000 due to tightened raises.

Financially, Meta reported a revenue of $56.3 billion in Q1 2026, a 33% year-on-year increase, marking the largest single-quarter growth in nearly five years, with a net profit of $26.7 billion. Meanwhile, the company has raised its capital expenditure budget for 2026 to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion, more than doubling from $72 billion in 2025, with funds clearly directed towards the development of "personal superintelligence" technology and data center construction.

Prior to this round of layoffs affecting 8,000 people, Meta had already cut hundreds of positions in departments like Reality Labs and Facebook from January to March this year. Including this adjustment, the total number of layoffs since 2022 has exceeded 30,000. Internally, over 1,500 employees had previously signed a petition opposing the company's use of employee data to train AI models that could replace their jobs, and employee morale has reportedly continued to decline.

Zuckerberg stated in an internal memo that "AI is the most decisive technology of this era, and success is not guaranteed," positioning this adjustment as a transformation of the company rather than merely a cost-cutting measure. According to Goldman Sachs, layoffs across the industry due to AI-related restructuring have reached over 16,000 per month in 2026, with Cisco also announcing a cut of about 4,000 employees, indicating that such adjustments are not isolated within the tech industry.

From a financial perspective, the market interprets this round of layoffs as a dual signal of "cost-cutting" and "betting on AI"—the positions eliminated are non-core AI roles in auditing, security, and content design, with the freed-up salary budget being directly redirected towards superintelligence research and computational infrastructure represented by the Hyperion data center co-built with Blue Owl Capital. On the day of the announcement, Meta's stock price only rose by 0.1%, indicating that investors had already priced in expectations for AI transformation, and there was no panic selling due to the layoffs themselves, but rather a focus on whether the expansion in capital expenditure can deliver long-term AI competitiveness.

Supplementary data: The Hyperion data center project aims to reach an initial capacity of 2 gigawatts by early 2030, making it one of Meta's largest publicly disclosed data center investment projects.

Source: Public Information