Meta is eliminating several hundred positions across sales, recruiting, and its Reality Labs hardware group, according to reports from The Information and Bloomberg. The cuts, which span the U.S. and multiple international offices, represent fewer than 1,000 roles at a company that ended 2025 with nearly 79,000 employees. Some affected staff will be offered alternative roles or relocation options, Bloomberg reported, as the company reshapes its workforce around artificial intelligence and core advertising.
Where The Cuts Are Landing Across Meta Teams
While the reductions are spread across multiple functions, recruiting and sales are among the most exposed, signaling a slower pace of net hiring and a continued push to streamline go-to-market teams. Reality Labs, the home of Meta’s Quest headsets, smart glasses, and augmented reality research, is also affected. The move follows a January round that trimmed roughly 10% of Reality Labs—about 1,000 roles out of a unit of 15,000—reported by The New York Times.
The targeting reflects a familiar pattern in big tech: scale back support and legacy growth roles while concentrating headcount on priority products and infrastructure. For Meta, that priority is AI—both the compute backbone needed to train large models and the teams that ship AI features across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
AI Spending And The Shift In Priorities At Meta
Meta has said it is investing billions in AI infrastructure, including data centers, high-end accelerators, and in-house silicon. Company guidance reported by Bloomberg points to record capital expenditures this year, estimated between $115 billion and $135 billion. That is a step-change from historic levels and underscores how aggressively the company is chasing advances in generative AI, recommendation systems, and content ranking.
The strategic logic is straightforward: make AI the growth engine that powers better ad performance, smarter creator tools, and more engaging consumer experiences. In practice, that means redeploying budget and talent toward model training, inference optimization, and product integration—areas that typically sit far from traditional sales or recruiting organizations.
Reality Labs Under Pressure Amid Cost Discipline
Reality Labs continues to be a long-horizon bet with heavy costs. Company filings have shown the unit racking up tens of billions of dollars in operating losses since 2019 as Meta pushes into mixed reality headsets, neural interfaces, and AR glasses. The latest trimming indicates leadership remains committed to the roadmap but is calibrating pace and resources amid AI’s near-term return profile.
There are signs of commercial traction—Quest hardware has a vocal enthusiast base, and the Ray-Ban smart glasses have gained mainstream visibility—but the unit is still far from the scale or profitability of Meta’s ads business. Concentrating headcount on the most promising form factors and software features, while aligning the rest of the company around AI, is consistent with the cost-discipline playbook Meta embraced during its “efficiency” reset.
A Continued Course Correction In Meta’s Strategy
This is the second staff reduction at Meta in 2026, following the January Reality Labs cuts, and it extends a multiyear rebalancing that began in 2023. Across the industry, peers have followed similar arcs: tighten non-core roles, emphasize AI, and prioritize products with clear monetization paths. For Meta, AI tools that enhance ad relevance, automate creative, and improve content discovery are already influencing performance metrics and advertiser budgets.
The company has also been standardizing operations around in-office collaboration, which can drive additional consolidation. People operations and recruiting often shrink as organizations stabilize headcount and retrain existing staff for emerging needs, rather than scale through net new hiring.
What To Watch Next As Meta Reshapes Its Workforce
Short-term, employees will look for clarity on internal transfers, relocation timelines, and severance specifics by region. Investors will focus on whether the reshuffle translates into faster AI feature velocity and measurable ad lift, while monitoring Reality Labs for signals that spending is being funneled to higher-confidence bets.
Taken together, the reductions are modest in scale but significant in message: Meta is doubling down on the systems and teams most closely tied to AI and cash-flow generation. With several hundred roles cut and others redirected, the company is again betting that a leaner structure—and outsized AI investment—will compound product gains faster than a broader, slower buildout could.
Sources referenced: The Information and Bloomberg on the scope and structure of the job cuts; The New York Times on the January Reality Labs reductions; Meta investor communications and regulatory filings for unit performance and capital expenditure context.