Meta CEO Zuckerberg blames layoffs on capital spending, won’t rule out more job cuts
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg attributed the Facebook parent’s planned layoffs to increased capital spending for AI, and declined to rule out further job cuts, in comments to employees at a company town hall on Thursday.
“We basically have two major cost centers in the company: compute infrastructure and people-oriented things,” Zuckerberg said in the session, heard by Reuters.
“If we’re investing more in one area to serve our community, then that means we have less capital to allocate to the other. So that means we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat,” he said.
The workforce cuts were unrelated to Meta’s reorganization of teams around a new “AI native” structure and efforts to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, Zuckerberg added.
The company’s silence on the layoffs amid announcements about the AI-oriented organizational “transformation,” as well as a new initiative to track employees’ mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes to train AI agents, has sparked outrage among Meta employees.
In some cases, staffers have openly criticized Zuckerberg and other company leaders on Meta’s internal message forum over the changes, according to copies of the comments viewed by Reuters.
