Inside Meta, employees are facing 28 days of uncertainty before layoffs hit.

• Meta told staff on Thursday that it planned to eliminate 10% of its workforce.
• Inside the company, employees are bracing for weeks of limbo as they wait to find out who will be cut.
• Meta employees responded internally with a mixture of questions, concerns, and jokes.

Welcome to "28 days of hell."

That's how one Meta employee characterized the tech giant's announcement that thousands of jobs will be cut on May 20. Employees flooded internal forums with similar posts, many of which were filled with anxiety, dark humor, and questions as they wait to learn who will be out of a job.

"How are you motivating yourself to work for the next 1 month with layoffs confirmed?" one person posted on the anonymous workplace app Blind, in a section just for Meta employees.

Someone else replied, "I'm motivating myself to do stuff that I can put on my resume for my next job lol."

In a memo sent to staff on Thursday, Meta said it shared some layoff details earlier than usual because the news had already leaked. The company plans to cut around 10% of employees next month and close 6,000 open roles.

"I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity, which is incredibly unsettling," wrote Meta's chief people officer Janelle Gale.

For some Meta employees, the fact that company leadership acknowledged layoffs brought some relief. The layoffs had been so widely discussed internally that the announcement helped ease some uncertainty, according to one employee who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

One of the top comments under Gale's internal Meta post was a picture of an elephant, a reference to leadership addressing the elephant in the room. Reuters first reported Meta was planning sweeping layoffs in March, and employees have been speculating on the extent of the cuts in the weeks since.

"elephant addressed!" commented another employee. Another posted a picture of an envelope that read: "Addressed to: "ELEPHANT."

Others said that having to wait almost a month to find out who would be affected created anxiety. One person posted that this was their first week at the company. "It might be goodbye for me," they wrote.

Another employee told Business Insider that the announcement added pressure for them to deliver results over the next month because it's unknown which teams will be affected by the cuts.

"I'm a little stressed about making impact in the next month," they said.

Despite a sense of added pressure, it's not the employee's first go-around with cuts at the company. The worker said they're going to continue working as usual, assuming the worst while trying to make the most of the next month as they wait for further updates.

"I assume I'm always two months away from being laid off, no matter what leadership says, so I'm going to continue to operate as usual," the employee said.

Employees also commented on Gale's internal post with questions.

One person asked if Meta staff would receive their August 15 stock payouts, which are part of some employees' compensation packages. Gale said that impacted employees would have a termination date prior to the August vest and would therefore not receive it.

"Because of the timing of the notifications, we will have just had the May 15 vest. There are some instances, based on work location, where people will remain employed through the August 15 vest," Gale wrote. Another employee thanked Gale for the clarification.

Another employee asked if travel would be restricted the week of May 20. "We are not restricting travel company-wide. VPs will share team-specific guidance," Gale responded.

'I feel more anxious about surviving'

On the Meta employee section of Blind, some users asked why Meta couldn't offer voluntary buyouts. Microsoft on Thursday offered one-time early retirement buyouts to thousands of its long-time employees, and Google has extended the same offers to staff across some orgs.

Many posts were from users asking others for information about which groups might be affected.

In a longer post, one user said the downside might be surviving the cuts.

"I feel more anxious about surviving this layoff," they wrote, recalling several rounds of layoffs at the company since 2022.

"Because we all know it's just gonna get worse for those of us who are left behind and have to absorb even more work, amongst other declining factors in this sad fearful company," they wrote.

• Arm announced its own AI chip, the AGI CPU, and is partnering with OpenAI and Meta.
• The new Arm AGI CPU aims to address energy efficiency and memory constraints in AI data centers.
• Despite strong growth prospects, Arm faces competition from established players like Nvidia and AMD.

Arm has long run its business as an architect behind the scenes, designing chips that power almost all the world's smartphone and making money off royalties from the chips it designs for customers.

Now, Arm is changing it up by announcing its own AI chip, the Arm AGI CPU.

Arm CEO Rene Haas said Tuesday at a company conference that this massive pivot wasn't just an internal strategy shift—it was a direct plea from the world's most powerful AI giants. The company name-dropped OpenAI and Meta as major partners for this chip.

"The biggest reason we're doing this is that our partners have asked for it," Haas said Tuesday.

With energy constraints and memory shortages, the AI boom has created a massive bottleneck in data centers. Faced with this demand, Arm stepped up with an AI chip that it says is more energy-efficient. Arm says it sees a $1.5 trillion market opportunity as it moves into AI chips for cloud, edge, and physical AI.

Arm stock was up by more than 18% on Wednesday. Mizuho analysts wrote that they see "strong growth opportunities" for Arm in AI infrastructure and the automotive industry. Bank of America research analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a note to investors that the company's outlook could be "too ambitious."

Meta and OpenAI partner with Arm

Meta has been building out data centers at a massive scale to power its apps and its latest superintelligence ventures. Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said Tuesday onstage that its coming "Hyperion" cluster could draw 5 gigawatts of power, enough to power 50 towns the size of Palo Alto.

"If we met the performance, we couldn't get the power. If we got the power, we wouldn't get the performance," Janardhan said.

This sparked an engineering project within Meta, where engineers were "working 'round the clock" to port its systems to Arm in three months, said Paul Saab, a Meta engineer.

"I didn't even ask my boss here for permission to buy these machines or even start the project," Saab said onstage.

While Saab says he saw major performance benefits, at the time, there wasn't an Arm chip available to buy.

OpenAI faced a similar problem. Its compute demand has grown massively as it trains and runs its ChatGPT models, its AI coding tool Codex, and more.

"That is one of the most common things I hear inside OpenAI. I need more compute," Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for science, said onstage, adding that it needed chips that were energy-efficient.

Arm said it expects this chip to generate $15 billion in revenue by fiscal 2031.

The chip market is 'getting very crowded'

Arm faces the risk that the CPU market is "getting very crowded," Arya wrote in his analyst note. Other competitors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, have more CPU products and more established customers. Notably, both Meta and OpenAI also work with AMD and Nvidia, which could leave "limited" opportunity for Arm's new CPU, Arya wrote.

"Moreover, the bigger AI grows, the more pressure ARM's smartphone/consumer markets would have from limited memory supplies," Arya wrote.

That said, the increasing demand has led many customers to turn to chip companies beyond Nvidia for their computing needs. Both Meta and OpenAI also work with Broadcom to build AI chips.

The rise of AI agents has also led to greater demand for inference, or how AI models draw conclusions and make predictions. While Nvidia's core AI chips, the GPUs, dominate AI training, CPUs like Arm's AGI CPU can also help with inference. Nvidia also recently made moves into this market.

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• Salesforce is skipping raises for director-level and above employees this year, according to an internal memo.
• The company said it is increasing stock and bonus pools for its "highest performing individuals."
• Employees will find out about their pay during reviews, which start at the end of this month.

Salesforce isn't offering raises this year to employees at the director level and above, according to an internal email viewed by Business Insider.

"We have decided to focus merit increases at the Senior Manager level (grade 8) and below," states the email, sent by the company's human-resources team.

Instead of giving raises, the company said it is increasing stock and bonus pools for its "highest performing individuals" among upper-level employees, calling it part of an "investment in performance and long-term growth."

Employees will learn about their compensation during performance reviews, which begin at the end of March.

Salesforce's decision could reflect a broader shift in how Big Tech is paying senior talent. Instead of increasing base pay, some companies are increasingly tying compensation to stock performance and equity, preserving cash while still incentivizing top leaders. Meta just announced this week that it created a lucrative incentive system for stock for a number of its C-suite executives.

Salesforce stock is down about 37% over the past year. CEO Marc Benioff recently downplayed fears about AI's threat to software-as-a-service companies. Those fears have prompted recent sell-offs of software stocks.

The email stated that 10% more directors and senior directors are getting stock grants, that the average stock grant increased, and that 80% of directors and senior directors who received "highly successful" or "exceptional" performance ratings received a 20% to 40% bigger grant.

The pool for bonuses "is funded at 103%," the email stated. Most eligible directors and senior directors received 100% or more of their bonus, and all of the directors and senior directors who received the top performance ratings got 115% to 140% of their bonuses.

Salesforce laid off some employees around the start of its fiscal year Feb. 1. Those cuts affected fewer than 1,000 employees, according to a person familiar with them. Around that time, the company also hired or promoted six new leaders, replacing five high-profile leaders who had recently announced departures from the company.

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