Meta up nearly 3% in premarket as it plans mass layoff to offset increased AI spending

Meta stock was on the up before U.S. markets opened on Thursday following reports the company is planning to lay off over 20% of its workforce to balance its staggering AI spending plans this year.

While the timing and details of the cuts had not been finalized, top executives at the tech giant told senior leaders to start making plans to reduce headcount, three anonymous sources familiar with the matter told Reuters in an article published on Saturday. Its shares were last up 2.7% in premarket trading at 6:16 a.m. ET, after it plunged nearly 4% on Sunday.

Meta employed nearly 79,000 employees as of December 2025, and the magnitude of the layoff described could affect more than 15,000 workers. This would be its largest layoff since late 2022, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was cutting 11,000 jobs and paring back hiring as part of an expansive cost-trimming strategy.

“This is a speculative report about theoretical approaches,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC on Monday.

Further potential Meta job cuts come as the tech giant doubles down on building out expensive AI infrastructure and reaping efficiency gains from AI integrated into its workflows.

Several firms have already revealed major redundancy plans linked to AI in 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block said it’s laying off 4,000 employees in February to enable the firm “to move faster with smaller, highly talented teams using AI to automate more work.”

Meanwhile, Amazon eliminated 16,000 roles in January in an effort to reduce layers and bureaucracy, amid plans to invest heavily in AI.

So far in 2026, AI has been cited in over 12,000 job cuts in the U.S., according to the latest data from consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

Meta revealed in its fourth-quarter earnings reports in January that its AI-related capital expenditure will be in the range of $115 billion and $135 billion this year, roughly double the amount it spent in 2025 in efforts to build its new AI unit.

This is part of a combined $700 billion that tech hyperscalers, including Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, are planning to invest in AI this year.

The plans have raised concerns among some investors about potentially unsustainable spending when compared with the amount of revenue being generated by AI.

Zuckerberg said that 2026 will be a major year for AI as the company’s investment focuses on his mission for “building personal super intelligence.”

Last year, the company invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. Meta ultimately poached the group’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, and some of his top engineers and researchers.

“While we have seen significant layoffs at companies like Block who laid off 40% of headcount ‘due to AI’, if Meta is willing to reduce headcount at this scale while ramping AI investment, we think it signals a broader shift: AI is increasingly driving productivity,” Jefferies’ analysts said in a note on Sunday.

“That has important implications not just for Meta, but across the broader internet/software landscape as investors revisit the link between headcount, growth, and margins…these cuts are clearly being considered in part to offset rising AI infrastructure costs with significant AI-driven capex ramp,” they added.