Meta began notifying roughly 8,000 employees on Wednesday that they are being laid off, the first wave of a major restructuring the company has framed as necessary to fund its push into artificial intelligence.

The cuts amount to about 10% of the company’s workforce. Meta had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March.

The cuts arrive alongside sweeping organisational changes aimed at flattening management layers, moving employees into AI-focused teams, and replacing more internal workflows with autonomous AI systems.

Separate from the cuts, Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale announced that upward of 7,000 workers will be redirected into newly created AI-focused teams.

In a memo to employees, Gale said the changes are “part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making. Teams are being reorganised into AI-focused ‘pods’ under new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang’s Superintelligence Labs.

The current restructuring is the largest companywide round of cuts since CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 2022–2023 “Year of Efficiency” campaign, which eliminated roughly 21,000 positions.

Affected employees will receive 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks per year of service, along with 18 months of health coverage.

Meta is not an outlier. The pattern is consistent: companies are reporting record revenues and simultaneously cutting headcount, redirecting the savings into AI infrastructure that they believe will generate more value than the employees it replaces.