According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg blamed the layoffs on data center and AI infrastructure spending.
“We [basically] have two cost centers in the company,” Zuckerberg said, according to the Journal, pointing to raw processing power, like GPUs and chips, and to data centers. “There’s [compute and infrastructure] and there’s people-oriented things, and if we’re investing more in one area to serve our community, then that means that we have less capital to basically allocate to the other.
“So that means that we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat.”
During the meeting, Zuckerberg also touched on downsizing teams in the future.
“If a team used to take 50 or 100 people and now it takes 10—having 50 or 100 people on that team can actually be counterproductive going forward. So I think we need to fix that,” Zuckerberg said.
Aside from the layoffs announcement in April, employee morale at Meta seems to have been on the decline in recent months. According to data from Blind that was reviewed by Fast Company, posts on the anonymous workplace platform containing negative sentiment about Meta have quadrupled since 2024.
