May 20, 2026 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
Meta has begun laying off 8,000 employees globally as part of a broader restructuring tied to its growing AI and data center investments. The company plans to reduce its workforce by around 10 percent to free up cash flow for expanded data center spending. At the same time, Meta has canceled plans to hire 6,000 new workers and will reassign another 7,000 employees to AI-focused initiatives. The company also plans to monitor and keylog employee activity to help train AI systems.
Despite its record expansion of data center infrastructure, Meta’s latest layoffs also affected several data center employees. Those impacted include experienced staff such as data center capacity engineers with 13 years at the company, directors of data center facilities engineering with eight years of tenure, data center site managers with seven years, and site operations and production engineers with around three years of experience. Separately, Dan Rabinovitsj, Meta’s VP of hardware and AI systems infrastructure engineering, also departed. He resigned ahead of the layoffs and previously oversaw much of Facebook’s data center connectivity engineering work.
"The recent advances in AI have spurred a renaissance in hardware engineering," he said in a farewell message to staff. "It's the most exciting time to be part of the hardware and silicon ecosystem in decades."
