Meta lays off hundreds of workers, including more from Reality Labs
TL;DR
Meta is laying off hundreds of employees, with Reality Labs, recruiting, sales, and Facebook teams among the hardest hit.
Key Points
- The cuts come one day after reports surfaced that Meta executives (excluding Zuckerberg) could receive new pay packages worth up to $2.7 billion each.
- Meta ended 2025 with roughly 79,000 employees – the current round is likely a precursor to a reported 20 percent workforce reduction leaked earlier in March.
- The underlying driver: Meta plans to spend $600 billion on AI data centers by 2028 and is hunting for internal cost offsets.
Nauti's Take
Spending $600 billion on data centers by 2028 is not a strategy – it is a bet on becoming indispensable AI infrastructure before the market locks in winners. The people paying for that bet first are Reality Labs employees, while executives pocket packages in the billions.
That is not bad optics – it is a deliberate signal about what Meta values at each layer of the org chart. The real question hanging over all of this is whether Reality Labs has any genuine future at Meta, or whether it is quietly being wound down one layoff round at a time.
Sources