Meta is cutting 8,000 jobs this week, the latest move in a long year of cuts.
The new wave starts Wednesday, with the cash freed up going somewhere new: the machines doing the work.
Meta's headcount is shrinking by about 10% on Wednesday, per an April memo, with another 6,000 open roles scrapped at the same time. That comes after Meta's first big layoff in late 2022, which hit 11,000 staff and later grew to 21,000.
This is not a one-time trim: finance chief Susan Li said on the last call that bosses "don't really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future."
Current and former workers told CNBC another round is expected in August, with more cuts later in the year. Those would come on top of about 1,000 Reality Labs cuts in January and hundreds more in March.
Meanwhile, Meta lifted its 2026 capital spending guidance by up to $10 billion last month, pushing the high end to $145 billion, with most of it tied to AI compute.
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Worker ratings on Blind, an anonymous work app, have fallen 25% from their 2024 peak, with culture ratings down 39%. The ratings now trail rivals Amazon, Google, and Netflix in nearly every group except pay.
Some of that anger has a name: the Model Capability Initiative, or MCI. It's an in-house tool that tracks mouse moves and keystrokes from worker computers to help train AI agents that can do white-collar tasks.
Staff have called the project "dystopian" in internal messages, with many signing a petition to shut it down over data leak fears and slower computers since the rollout.
Meta has also handed AI strategy to AI chief Alexandr Wang, while the stock is down about 7% this year and almost 5% over the past 12 months, making it the worst megacap besides Microsoft.
Tech layoffs in 2026 are already approaching 110,000 across 137 firms, per Layoffs.fyi, with the 2023 peak above 260,000 and last year's total at about 125,000.
Cisco gave investors a preview of the trade, announcing fewer than 4,000 job cuts last week and lifting its AI guidance, sending the stock up more than 13% on Thursday for its best day since 2011.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wrote that AI-era winners will be the ones with "focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest."
That's the trade Wall Street is rewarding: shrink the workforce, scale the compute. Meta is making the same bet with a much bigger checkbook.
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