Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp, has begun notifying 8,000 employees worldwide about layoffs as part of a restructuring aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs while investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI).
The layoffs, which are expected to hit Meta's engineering and product teams particularly hard, are part of the company's efforts to keep pace with rivals like Alphabet's Google and OpenAI, which have also made significant investments in AI.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company's top priority, committing all resources to developing and implementing AI technologies, but this aggressive spending has raised concerns among investors who worry that the company's investments may not ultimately pay off.
While Meta has framed the layoffs as an opportunity to 'offset' the cost of some of its major AI investments, Evercore analysts estimate the cuts will yield only about $3 billion in savings, a small portion of Meta's projected capital expenditures this year, which could hit $145 billion.
