{"id":631403,"date":"2026-04-27T07:18:47","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T07:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/631403\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T07:18:47","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T07:18:47","slug":"microsoft-and-meta-announce-large-staff-reductions-as-they-spend-big-on-ai-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/631403\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft and Meta announce large staff reductions as they spend big on AI | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta and Microsoft<\/a> are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting their companies\u2019 productivity needs.<\/p>\n

Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut some 10% of its personnel \u2013 just under 8,000 employees\u2013 to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago<\/a>. The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. The same day, Microsoft announced<\/a> to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its American workforce of roughly 125,000.<\/p>\n

In an internal memo to Meta\u2019s staff, Janelle Gale, the chief people officer, didn\u2019t mention AI explicitly but said the cuts would allow the company to \u201coffset the other investments we\u2019re making\u201d. In Meta\u2019s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings presentation, the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, spoke about a \u201cmajor AI acceleration\u201d that included plans to spend from $115bn to $135bn on AI<\/a> \u2013 nearly twice the company\u2019s capital expenditure the previous year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not an easy tradeoff,\u201d Gale wrote. She emphasized that laid-off employees would receive generous severance packages.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg, in contrast to Gale, has said outright that AI is making some hiring unnecessary. \u201cWe\u2019re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,\u201d he said in the January earnings call<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meta confirmed news reports of the layoffs and internal memo, but declined to comment further.<\/p>\n

Microsoft wrote to its employees on Thursday that it would be offering voluntary buyouts to longtime employees, in particular those for whom the sum of their ages and years at the company amount to 70 or greater, according to the FT<\/a>. More than 8,000 employees would qualify, according to the FT. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

In July 2025, Microsoft forecast that it would spend some $100bn<\/a> on AI infrastructure in the coming fiscal year. Analysts now estimate<\/a> that figure to be $110bn-$120bn.<\/p>\n

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft\u2019s AI chief, said<\/a> in February that he believes that AI will be able to replace most white-collar work within the next 12 to 18 months.<\/p>\n

Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, has trumpeted Microsoft\u2019s internal AI adoption, which he says has led to major productivity gains. In April 2025, he claimed<\/a> that AI handled as much as 30% of the company\u2019s coding work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are only at the beginning phases of AI diffusion, and already Microsoft has built an AI business that is larger than some of our biggest franchises,\u201d he said in a January press release<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg was sitting onstage with Nadella as the Microsoft CEO made the remark. When Nadella asked Zuckerberg how much of the social media company\u2019s coding was done by AI, Zuckerberg said: \u201cOur bet is sort of that in the next year probably \u2026 maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The redundancy announcements from the two tech giants come amid tech workers\u2019 growing concerns that their bosses will try to replace them with AI. Those fears aren\u2019t unfounded.<\/p>\n

Employees themselves are becoming fodder to train AI models. Reuters recently<\/a> uncovered an internal memo at Meta showing that the company is installing new software on American employees\u2019 computers to record their mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes to feed into AI training data.<\/p>\n

Other companies doubling down on AI have slashed their numbers, too. The Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut almost half the company\u2019s workforce<\/a> in early March, citing gains in AI. Amazon, which announced plans to spend a whopping $200bn<\/a> in one year in February, has laid off<\/a> at least 30,000 workers in the last six months. Oracle, which is struggling with the debt load<\/a> of its multibillion-dollar investment in datacenters, told employees last month that it would be cutting thousands of jobs<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta and Microsoft are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-631403","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}