The Reuters News Agency is reporting that Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is preparing plans to lay off as much as 20% – “or more” – of the entire company. These plans are being made at the same time that the company has said it is preparing to spend at least $600 billion on data centers by 2028 to facilitate its growing artificial intelligence (AI) business.
Read more on the huge disruption at Meta…
Multiple sources are telling Reuters that the company is deep in planning both to cut its headcount and increase its AI spending at some unnamed time in the near future. The layoffs, these sources tell Reuters, are “…to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets…” At the same time, the company believes that its growing AI division will help to improve efficiency at the company.
That last point sounds a lot like “AI washing.” What is AI washing? The concept of trying to cover up a negative story with a more positive explanation was known years ago as “whitewashing.” Now, many analysts believe that companies are trying to hide genuine business problems, such as slowing demand, declining profits, and other negative trends, by implementing layoffs and erroneously attributing them to a proactive action taken to improve efficiencies brought about by the company’s investment in AI tools.
Is Meta ‘AI Washing’?
Is that what the mighty Meta is doing?
“This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in response to questions about the plan.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of such a plan. At the end of 2025, company filings stated it employed 79,000 people. If the company marches forward with a 20% workforce reduction plan, nearly 16,000 (15,800) employees will lose their jobs and be released into an already difficult labor market. That is more than the company initially laid off in 2022, the so-called “year of efficiency (they later had yet another round of layoff in early 2023 of another 10,000 jobs).
Meta Has Been Hiring Aggressively in the Last 12-18 Months for the AI Division
Over the last 12-18 months, Meta has been on an aggressive hiring push as it sought to catch up to its AI competitors. Zuckerberg himself got involved, offering huge pay packages – some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years- to try to attract the top AI talent and create a new “superintelligence” team.
In any event, the company has signalled to investors that it intends to spend $600 billion between now and the end of 2028 to accelerate the buildout of data centers necessary to help further fuel its AI program. The company recently acquired Moltbook – a platform for AI agents – and has spent another $2 billion to acquire Manus, a Chinese AI startup.
Zuckerberg Notes AI Efficiency Gains; ‘A Single…Person’ Can Accomplish More Than Big Teams
Suspiciously, Zuckerberg was recently quoted saying the company is beginning to see efficiency gains from its AI efforts – saying, “projects that used to require big teams now [can] be accomplished by a single very talented person.”
Is that AI-washing? Perhaps… But Zuckerberg is joining a growing trend. Recently, fintech company Block, whose CEO is Jack Dorsey (inventor of Twitter), laid off nearly half of its entire staff. Dorsey pointed to efficiency gains as the reason for the layoffs. And earlier this year, Amazon confirmed to the media that it planned to cut 16,000 jobs, about 10% of its total headcount, also due to AI efficiency gains.
Many industry analysts are skeptical of these companies’ claims of “efficiency” driving layoffs.
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