Meta Moves 7,000 Staff To AI Roles, Plans To Lay Off 8,000

Meta Platforms has reassigned about 7,000 employees to newly created artificial intelligence-focused roles as the social media firm intensifies its restructuring strategy, underscoring how the global race for AI dominance is reshaping employment across the technology sector.

The move comes as the company is also expected to cut roughly 10 per cent of its workforce, estimated at 8,000 jobs, this week as part of a broader corporate overhaul aimed at streamlining operations and accelerating investment in AI products and infrastructure.

The latest development highlights growing concerns over how artificial intelligence is transforming global labour markets, with major technology firms increasingly reallocating workers from traditional roles into AI-related functions while reducing headcount in non-core units.

According to Bloomberg reports, the reassigned employees will be moved into four newly established teams focused on building AI applications, autonomous agents, and enterprise solutions, as Meta Platforms’ chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, deepens the company’s strategic shift towards AI.

An internal memo from Meta‘s Head of HR, Janelle Gale, had told employees that 7,000 of them would move to four new units charged with building AI tools and applications.

She said, “It will make (Meta) more productive and make the work more rewarding.” She added in the memo that the new corporate structures will be “flatter” with small teams.

The company reportedly directed employees in North America to work remotely on Wednesday, when notices for both layoffs and role transfers are expected to be issued, a sign of the scale of the internal transition.

Meanwhile, tech analysts noted that the move reflects a wider trend in the global technology industry, where companies are aggressively repositioning their workforce to support AI expansion as spending on data centres, large language models and automation tools rises sharply.

Meta has emerged as one of the most aggressive investors in the AI race, with reports indicating the company plans to spend up to $135 billion this year on AI infrastructure, talent acquisition and product development to compete with rivals such as Google and OpenAI. Similarly, the restructuring has triggered internal employee concerns, with reports of protests over workplace monitoring tools and dissatisfaction with the company’s handling of the transition, raising fresh questions about the social cost of rapid AI adoption in corporate operations.

While the AI boom is creating new opportunities for specialised workers, it is also accelerating job displacement across the global technology industry, even as the trend is likely to influence labour policies and workforce planning far beyond Silicon Valley.