Meta is laying off hundreds of employees as it pours money into AI

In the world of big tech, loyalty to a vision can be fleeting, and priorities can change within a single quarter. Meta, the giant led by Mark Zuckerberg, is proving once again that it will not hesitate to make deep personnel cuts to fund its latest arms race. According to recent reports from The New York Times, NBC News, and The Information, the corporation is laying off hundreds of employees while shifting billions of dollars toward the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The job reductions did not spare the company's key divisions. The restructuring process affected recruitment, sales, and social media teams. Most significantly, however, the wave of layoffs hit Reality Labs again — the division that was supposed to be the foundation of the "metaverse" and now seems to be losing importance in the face of AI dominance. This is a clear signal that the era of unlimited optimism toward virtual reality has come to an end, giving way to hard calculations of profits from language models and data centers.

Restructuring in the shadow of billion-dollar investments

The company's official stance, conveyed by spokesperson Tracy Clayton, is subdued and fits into the corporate rhetoric of optimization. Meta claims it regularly implements changes to ensure teams are best positioned to achieve their goals. Although Clayton declined to provide the exact number of people laid off, the scale of the phenomenon is felt within structures employing nearly 79,000 employees (as of December 2025). The company declares that it tries to find alternative positions for those affected by the reduction, but for hundreds of specialists, the reality is brutal.

The key to understanding these moves is the figure of $135 billion. This is how much Meta plans to spend on expanding data centers dedicated to artificial intelligence and on strategic technological partnerships. One of the most important points of this strategy is securing a deal to use the first CPU from Arm in its proprietary computing systems. This massive financial burden forces the search for savings in areas that do not generate a direct return on investment in the new, AI-oriented ecosystem.

Reality Labs on the sidelines

The Reality Labs division, responsible for smart glasses and VR headsets, is going through an exceptionally difficult period. Not long ago, it was the heart of Meta's identity; today, it is subject to permanent reduction. In January alone, at least 1,000 people lost their jobs there. Subsequent months brought the closure of three studios involved in creating VR games and the complete abandonment of the metaverse platform dedicated to professional work. Even the popular fitness app Supernatural has stopped receiving new content.

Decision-making chaos is also visible in the approach to flagship software products. In February, Meta announced the closure of the VR version of its social platform Horizon Worlds, only to reverse that decision just a few weeks later. Currently, the company declares that the app will remain available for download "for the foreseeable future." Such abrupt course changes suggest that internal resources are being torn between trying to save the remains of the metaverse vision and the necessity of catching up with the competition in the generative AI sector.

• Reductions: Hundreds of employees in sales, recruitment, and social media departments.
• AI Budget: Up to $135 billion for infrastructure and Arm processors.
• Reality Labs: Another wave of layoffs following the 1,000-job reduction in January.
• VR Projects: Closure of three studios and halting the development of the Supernatural app.

A new order in Silicon Valley

Meta is not the only player making such drastic shifts. However, the pace at which the company is moving away from its namesake identity (Metaverse) is astonishing. The investment in Arm architecture and its own data centers is an attempt to become independent of external hardware suppliers and build a computing powerhouse that will allow for training next-generation models. In this scenario, traditional sales or recruitment teams become too costly a burden.

From an industry perspective, Meta's actions are a classic "escape forward." The AI market does not forgive delays, and the lead gained by companies like OpenAI or Google forces Zuckerberg to act aggressively. The cost of this transformation is not only billions of dollars but, above all, human capital. VR and AR specialists, who just two years ago were the most sought-after experts in the company, must now find a place in a new structure where data engineering and machine learning take the lead.

One could argue that Meta has ceased to be a social media company and has become an AI infrastructure corporation. Every subsequent layoff in non-technical departments brings it closer to a model where success is determined not by the number of moderators or recruiters, but by the performance of computing clusters and the optimization of algorithms. If this risky $135 billion gamble does not pay off, Meta could wake up in a reality where it has neither a dominant position in AI nor a capable team able to maintain its existing products.