Meta Platforms Inc. is reportedly planning to lay off as much as 20% of its global staff, according to a report by Reuters Friday which cited three people familiar with the company’s inner workings.

The layoffs are being made in order to offset the company’s costly investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure and lay the groundwork for more business processes to be automated by AI-powered autonomous workers, the report said.

The magnitude of the layoffs has not been finalized and no date for the cuts has been agreed, the sources told Reuters. Senior executives at the company signalled their intentions to other top officials at Meta in the last week, telling them to start planning how and where the layoffs can be implemented, two of the sources said. A spokesperson for Meta declined to confirm the report, saying it’s “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”

If Meta really does lay off 20% of its staff, it would represent the most significant cuts at the company since late 2022 and early 2023, when it embarked on what became known as a “year of efficiency.” It cut more than 11,000 staff in November 2022, representing about 13% of its workforce. Four months later, it let another 10,000 workers go.

The proposed layoffs come at a time when Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing the company hard to compete better in the AI industry against rivals such as Google LLC and OpenAI Group PBC. The company went on a hiring spree last year, paying multimillion-dollar salaries to some of the industry’s leading researchers to build its new superintelligence team.

Last month, the company announced it’s going to spend $600 billion on building data centers by 2028. It has also spent millions on acquisitions, buying the social networking platform for AI agents Moltbook last week, and spending around $2 billion to buy the agentic AI startup Manus. In January, referred to “efficiency gains” from such investments, saying that “projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.”

Meta wouldn’t be the first big technology company to try and replace human workers with AI systems. In January, Amazon.com Inc. said it’s cutting 16,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce. Then in February, Block announced it’s chopping almost half of its staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey saying that many of them will be replaced by AI tools.

Meta’s AI strategy has faced a number of setbacks, especially with regard to its Llama 4 models that launched last year. The company attracted a lot of criticism over their disappointing performance, causing it to abandon the release of a more powerful version of that model, called Behemoth. Its new Superintelligence team is now working on a new model dubbed “Avocado,” but it’s not clear when it will be released.

Image: Meta Platforms