The number is $135 billion. That’s Meta’s AI infrastructure spend this year — Zuckerberg just raised the forecast again because apparently $115B wasn’t enough silicon for the guy who already owns your attention span. To cover the difference, he’s cutting 8,000 employees starting May 20, plus cancelling 6,000 open roles. Fourteen thousand positions, gone. Meta posted record profits last quarter. The budget isn’t tight — the priorities are.
He told them at a company town hall. To their faces. “The layoffs are a direct consequence of the AI budget.” The company restructures into AI “pods,” which sounds like a sci-fi horror movie where the humans realize too late they were just the training data. There are worse things than getting fired, but being told to your face that you lost your job to a spreadsheet row called “capex” is close.
This is the playbook now. You don’t get fired because the company is struggling. You get fired because it’s winning and decided it would rather have servers. Eight thousand people can’t tell their families “I got replaced because we had a great year” without sounding delusional — but that’s exactly what happened. Zuckerberg explaining it like he’s doing you a favor by being honest about it is a special kind of insulting.