Mark Zuckerberg says AI spending and war drove Meta layoffs

In a few weeks, Meta will lay off 10% of its workforce—around 8,000 employees out of the company’s workforce of 78,000. In a recent Q&A with employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg (not the AI clone version) shed some light on the reasons behind the downsizing. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg blamed the layoffs to data center and AI infrastructure spending. “We [basically] have two cost centers in the company,” Zuckerberg said, according to the Journal, pointing to raw processing power, like GPUs and chips, as well as data centers. “There’s [compute and infrastructure] and there’s people-oriented things, and if we’re investing more in one area to serve our community, then that means that we have less capital to basically allocate to the other.” “So that means that we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat.” During the meeting, Zuckerberg also touched on downsizing teams in the future. “If a team used to take 50 or 100 people and now it takes 10, having 50 or 100 people on that team can actually be counterproductive going forward—so I think we need to fix that,” Zuckerberg said. Between the layoffs, employee morale at Meta seems to have faltered in recent months. According to data from Blind reviewed by Fast Company, posts on the anonymous workplace platform containing negative sentiment about Meta have quadrupled since 2024. In response to Fast Company, Meta referred to the company’s Thursday earnings call, during which Meta CFO Susan Li said that Meta is “very focused on leveraging AI tools” to boost productivity, and still navigating the company’s future “optimal size.” Li added that because of the layoffs, Meta expects lower employee compensation costs compared to last quarter. “But that is offset within this year by restructuring costs that we expect to incur as part of the layoffs,” she added. Looking ahead, Zuckerberg said Meta’s focus will shift to building more new apps. “Historically, we’ve built like four or five bi