Meta just cut roughly 8,000 jobs, approximately 10% of its workforce, in one of the largest layoff rounds in the company’s history. The company also canceled around 6,000 open roles, effectively removing about 14,000 positions from the org chart in a single stroke.
Meta reported record Q1 2026 revenue of approximately $56.3B with a net profit of $26.8B. Meta expects AI-related capital expenditures to land between $125B and $145B this year, centered on data centers, GPU clusters, and supporting its family of Llama models.
Bank of America estimates the restructuring could save $7B to $8B annually in operating costs.
The running total is staggering
Since late 2022, Meta has eliminated more than 30,000 positions across multiple rounds. The first wave hit in November 2022 with 11,000 cuts. Another 10,000 followed in March 2023. Now this latest round adds another 8,000 to the pile.
What this means for the AI arms race
Llama, Meta’s open-source large language model series, has become a cornerstone of the company’s AI strategy, and one of the most widely adopted open-source AI frameworks in the industry.
Why crypto investors should pay attention
Meta’s planned $125B to $145B in AI capital expenditure represents enormous demand for GPU infrastructure. This has downstream effects on decentralized compute networks like Render, Akash, and other projects building marketplaces for distributed GPU power.
When a company lays off 8,000 people in a single round, a meaningful percentage of those workers are engineers, product managers, and researchers with deep technical expertise. Previous Meta layoff rounds contributed to a wave of talent flowing into crypto startups and decentralized protocol teams.
Meta’s decision to deprioritize its virtual reality and metaverse initiatives — the very projects that prompted the Facebook-to-Meta rebrand — suggests that even trillion-dollar companies struggle to make metaverse economics work on a meaningful timeline.
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