Meta Platforms is taking another step towards a ‘year of efficiency’ that seems to have no end in sight. Last Wednesday, the Menlo Park-based giant carried out another round of layoffs, involving several hundred employees in key business units. Although the scale of the cuts is smaller than in previous years, the signal sent to the market is clear: Mark Zuckerberg’s company is prioritising resources where it sees the future, ruthlessly slashing spending in other areas.
According to sources close to the company, the reductions have mainly affected the Reality Labs departments, the social media operations teams and the recruitment structures. This is a strategic shift of emphasis.
While Reality Labs continues to generate billions of dollars in losses in pursuit of its metaversum vision, the Met must simultaneously fund the murderous AI arms race. Spending projections for 2026, as high as $169 billion, leave no illusions – the battle for supremacy in AI requires gigantic capital that must be raised from somewhere.
The company’s official position is to ‘restructure regularly to achieve strategic objectives’. But for business analysts, the deeper context is more complex. The Met is struggling with rising labour costs, driven by the need to attract the most expensive engineering talent on the market specialising in machine learning.
As a result, the company is pursuing a ’tissue replacement’ strategy: reducing staff in mature or less promising areas in order to free up budget for astronomical salaries for Llama model experts.
With nearly 79,000 employees, the company is no longer a monolith focused solely on growth. Today, it is an organisation that is learning to operate in continuous optimisation mode. Every vacancy in the recruitment team brings the company closer to funding the next H100 processor cluster. An era has dawned in Silicon Valley in which innovation is no longer just about creating the new, but above all about daring to let go of what is no longer a priority.
