• Meta previously announced it will cut 10% of its staff next month.
• Meta's HR chief told staff in a meeting that she can't promise further layoffs won't happen.
• She added that the business is strong and acknowledged that morale has been affected at Meta.

Meta plans to lay off around 10% of its staff next month, and it told staff it's not ruling out deeper cuts.

That's what Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer, told employees in an internal meeting on Thursday, according to three sources on the call.

"Will there be more layoffs? The question always comes up. I'd love to say that there are no more layoffs, but I can't say something we can't deliver," Gale said during the meeting. "While the business is strong, priorities change, competition is fierce, and we will continue to manage our costs responsibly."

She said this means that Meta will "continue to evolve teams as needed" and "try to redeploy talent." She pointed to how Meta is investing in its Applied AI organization.

Gale added that some organizations would be more affected by layoffs than others, though she did not specify which.

Meta leaders also said during the meeting that AI token usage would not be considered as a factor for the layoffs.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also addressed the layoffs at the meeting, saying that AI automation is not the driving factor behind them. He said that AI has made small teams far more efficient.

During the call, Zuckerberg also addressed Meta's plan to monitor employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to improve its AI models. He said humans are not actually watching what the staff are doing and that this data is abstracted and used to improve AI.

Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang also appeared at the meeting, sporting a camouflage-pattern T-shirt featuring multiple deer, according to a photo seen by Business Insider. During the Q&A, he praised Meta's latest AI prowess, notably the recent release of its Spark model.

Meta declined to comment for this article.

Reuters reported in March that Meta plans to cut about 20% of its total staff this year.

Given the looming layoffs, Gale said at the meeting that they hit morale at Meta, and the company tries to make tough situations like that "the best version possible." She added that Meta has tripled COBRA healthcare coverage to 18 months.

Meta CFO Susan Li previously said during its first quarter earnings call on Wednesday that she "doesn't really know" the ideal size of the company's head count, which runs at above 77,000. Meta announced that its infrastructure spend, largely for AI, is doubling this year, to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion.

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• Google and Amazon have ambitions to sell AI chips to customers.
• That could make things awkward with Nvidia, which the two tech giants also rely on.
• Taking on Nvidia won't be easy, but one analyst said the process is now "irreversible."

Two of Nvidia's biggest customers might be turning into its biggest threat.

For three years, Nvidia's stock has defied gravity on the premise that the AI industry needs its chips. On Wednesday, when Google and Amazon reported their Q1 earnings, both signaled ambitions to sell their own custom AI chips directly to customers.

So far, Google's TPUs and Amazon's Trainium chips have only been available through Google and Amazon's cloud services. Customers can pay to use them, but they don't own them.

Nvidia is the undisputed leader in AI chips right now. While that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon, recent remarks from Google and Amazon suggest they are ready to challenge Nvidia's throne.

Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, laid down the gauntlet to Nvidia in his annual letter to shareholders earlier this month.

"Virtually all AI thus far has been done on Nvidia chips, but a new shift has started," Jassy wrote, adding that it's "quite possible" that Amazon could start selling its chips directly to customers.

He put a timeline on this plan on the company's Wednesday earnings call, saying "there's a good chance" Amazon will start offering full racks of Trainium chips beyond its own cloud "over the next couple of years."

Google gave an even stronger commitment — and a nearer timeline.

On Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai publicly said for the first time that the company plans to deliver TPU chips to a "select group of customers" in their own data centers this year, but said the "vast majority" of revenues from those sales won't be realized until 2027.

Pichai said there was a big opportunity for Google's semiconductor business, which would also help fund the next generation of chips. That flywheel could create a mammoth business for Google. Morgan Stanley said in a December research note that selling 500,000 TPU chips could add roughly $13 billion in revenue to Google's balance sheet in 2027.

The company said in its 10-Q filing that it had so far signed a "limited number of agreements" to supply TPUs to customers.

It's also where things could get awkward. Google and Amazon are also big customers of Nvidia. They purchase Nvidia's chips to lease to their customers in their own data centers. Amazon and Google have both said that they will continue to work with Nvidia.

Nvidia shares were down more thean 4% on Thursday. The company didn't immediately respond to a Business Insider request for comment.

'Concerned but not worried'

Breaking into Nvidia's chip dominance will not be easy, analysts told Business Insider.

"Nvidia should be concerned but not worried," said Alvin Nguyen, a senior analyst at Forrester. Nvidia has built a strong ecosystem of hardware, software, and support that has made it easy for customers to choose them, he said.

"Selling products is very different than access to them," he said, adding that Amazon and Google would need to provide services like education and support to enterprises looking to buy their chips.

Google and Amazon's chip racks are also "very bespoke and proprietary" and customized for their own respective data centers, said Patrick Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy. That poses a challenge for reaching mass adoption, he said.

Plus, the chip market isn't a zero-sum game. AI companies are increasingly diversifying and using chips from multiple suppliers simultaneously. OpenAI, for example, has chip deals with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, among others.

However, custom silicon is becoming an "increasingly important part of the AI story" for Google and Amazon, Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik wrote in a note on Thursday. Both companies are pitching their chips as being more cost-effective than Nvidia's.

That opportunity is also opening up as the needs of the AI industry shifts. Earlier this month, Google announced a new TPU chip specifically for inference — the process of running the models once they're trained — which is becoming more critical as more companies bring AI agents online.

Beatriz Valle, a senior analyst for enterprise technology & services at GlobalData, called the decision by Google and Amazon an "extraordinary move" that will diversify the chip sector — and reduce cloud providers' dependence on Nvidia chips.

"This process will take years but it is irreversible now," she said.

• Around 600 Google employees urged CEO Sundar Pichai to reject classified Pentagon AI deals.
• They said they want to see AI benefit humanity, not be used for autonomous weapons or surveillance.
• Google and the Pentagon are in talks to use Gemini in classified settings, per a recent report.

Around 600 Google employees sent a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday, urging him not to let the company's AI technology be used by the US military for classified operations.

The letter, signed by employees in Google's DeepMind and Cloud divisions, cited a recent Information report that Google and the Pentagon were negotiating the use of Google's Gemini AI in classified settings.

"As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they do make mistakes," the employees wrote in the letter. "We feel that our proximity to this technology creates a responsibility to highlight and prevent its most unethical and dangerous uses."

"Currently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads," employees continued in the letter. "Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them."

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Google has not yet responded to the letter, said Jane Chung, the founder of Justice Speaks, a communications firm representing the workers. Bloomberg first reported on the letter.

Google has long faced internal pushback to its efforts to work with the US military. In 2018, it decided not to renew Project Maven, a Department of Defense contract to integrate AI into military operations, following pressure from hundreds of employees. Palantir later picked up the deal.

The same year, Google established a set of AI principles, including a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance. Last year, it updated those AI principles to remove wording around weapons and surveillance.

The company also secured new contracts with the Pentagon last year to use its AI and cloud products. In March, the company said it would provide the Pentagon with AI agents in a non-classified setting. It also told Google DeepMind employees during a January meeting that they should expect more of these types of deals.

In the letter, Google employees raised concerns that classified work would lead to a lack of oversight into how the company's technology is used.

"We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways," the employees wrote. "This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance but extends beyond."

Read the full letter below:

Dear Sundar,

We are Google employees who are deeply concerned about ongoing negotiations between Google and the US Department of Defense. As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they do make mistakes. We feel that our proximity to this technology creates a responsibility to highlight and prevent its most unethical and dangerous uses.

Therefore, we ask you to refuse to make our AI systems available for classified workloads.

We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways. This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance but extends beyond. Currently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads. Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them.

Making the wrong call right now would cause irreparable damage to Google's reputation, business, and role in the world. At this very moment, the safety of our own workforce and critical infrastructure are under active threat. Human lives are already being lost and civil liberties put at risk at home and abroad from misuses of the technology we're playing a key role in building.

We know from our own history that our leaders can make the right choices, for ourselves and for the world, when the stakes are high.

Today, we call on you, Sundar, to act according to the values on which this company was built, and refuse classified workloads.

• 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.

• Meta has set goals for some employees on how much they should use AI.
• They include targets for using AI code assistants, agents, and other tools.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants the company to be "AI-native."

Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to be "AI-native." An internal document shows one way the company's CEO plans to get there.

The company has set goals for how much some employees should use AI tools for tasks such as coding.

Meta employees created a document to collect information about these goals from across different organizations, according to a copy seen by Business Insider. It includes goals set late last year and for 2026.

Tech companies are using various methods to motivate staff to use AI, such as tying AI use to performance reviews and gamifying AI use with competitive leaderboards.

The document states that Meta's creation org, which is responsible for building and maintaining core creative experiences, set a goal for the first half of 2026 that 65% of engineers are expected to write more than 75% of their committed code using AI. Committed code is code that has been saved and tracked in a project.

Meta's Scalable Machine Learning org, which focuses on AI models and infrastructure, had a goal for February 2026 to achieve 50% to 80% AI-assisted code, the document said. It cited a comment alongside this goal from a senior engineering manager that said: "We are not tracking this via metrics."

The document also listed several companywide goals for Q4 2025 for central products — a horizontal org spanning Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other major products. One target is for 80% of mid to senior-level engineers to adopt AI tools such as DevMate, Metamate, and Google's Gemini, with a note that the focus is on "tool adoption" rather than the percentage of code written by AI.

It said that 55% of code changes from software engineers across the central product orgs should be "Agent-Assisted."

It is not clear whether the goals listed in the document are tied to performance reviews.

"It's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. They said that Meta's performance program is focused on rewarding impact from AI tools, not just usage.

Here's a breakdown of Meta's goals in the memo:

• Companywide Q4 2025 Goals (Central Products)

  • 55% of software engineers' code changes should be agent-assisted.
  • 80% of mid to senior-level engineers should adopt general AI tools.

• Scalable ML Team Goal (Feb 2026)

  • Target: 50% to 80% AI-assisted code.

• Creation Org H1 2026

  • 65% of engineers should write more than 75% of their committed code using AI.

(Note: Some technical terms have been rephrased for clarity)

Mark Zuckerberg's AI odyssey

Zuckerberg is aggressively trying to make Meta what he has called an "AI-native" company. Meta has started tying employee performance to their AI usage, Business Insider reported last year, and staff are using Meta's internal AI bot to write reviews for their peers.

More recently, the company rebranded some employees within a division of Reality Labs with one of three titles: "AI Builder," "AI Pod Lead," or "AI Org Lead."

The change comes as Meta is adopting smaller teams and moving toward a flatter organizational structure.

"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," read a memo about the changes, which was reviewed by Business Insider. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told staff on Tuesday that he would take charge of Meta's "AI for Work" initiative, which is designed to boost the company's internal adoption of AI tools, according to a memo reviewed by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Meta laid off several hundred employees across Reality Labs and other orgs this week.

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• Meta might not yet have the best AI models, but it could be winning on another crucial front.
• Meta is considering major layoffs across the company, Business Insider reported.
• A top analyst suggested these cuts could signal that Meta's AI transformation is underway.

Could more Meta layoffs mean the company still has bloat to trim — or could it signal its AI investments are actually starting to pay off?

A note from a top Wall Street analyst said on Monday that any head count cutting from Meta could actually be a sign that it's successfully rebuilding itself as an "AI-forward" company.

That could be bad for its rivals.

While Meta's deep investment in AI has so far not produced leading models like Google's and OpenAI's, Bernstein's Mark Shmulik said Meta's aggressive push to overhaul itself into a top-to-bottom AI company could put it ahead of competitors and trigger a "wave of panic" as competitors scramble to copy it.

Meta is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building out AI data centers and luring talent to shore up its AI research teams. Last week, Business Insider reported the company was weighing up layoffs, with some managers being asked to draw up cost-cutting plans.

Bernstein's Shmulik said this could be a signal that Meta is winning on a crucial front in the AI wars. While companies can win with world-class frontier models, they can also beat the competition by deploying AI so deeply across the core business that their competitive moat "widens beyond dispute," Shmulik wrote.

"Meta has already demonstrated the compelling returns they're seeing from deploying AI to core workloads," wrote Shmulik. "But if the company can now re-design their operations from the ground up to be AI-forward, their potential cost and performance advantage could be insurmountable."

By one metric, Zuckerberg's efficiency drive over the past three years has paid off. Revenue per employee has steadily increased over that time period, with the company overtaking Amazon last year, according to data shared in the Bernstein note this week. Pinterest was the only company with a higher ratio.

At the same time, Meta's capex and R&D spend per employee have significantly outpaced rivals, according to the Bernstein report, which could point to a reason for the potential layoffs.

Investors appeared to react positively to Meta weighing up further cuts, with the company's shares up about 2% early Monday.

AI-washing? Maybe not.

Like other Big Tech companies, Meta has moved quickly to chase AI.

It has also been aggressively driving AI adoption internally. The company said it would start grading employees on their "AI-driven impact" in performance reviews starting this year, and has tracked how some teams have been using the tools, Business Insider previously reported.

Companies including Atlassian and Block have cited AI as a reason for recent layoffs, raising the question of whether some leaders are "AI-washing" and using the technology to camouflage other reasons for cuts, such as financial problems or overhiring during the COVID pandemic.

Bernstein's Shmulik said that while AI-washing was possible in Meta and other companies' cases, he said that layoffs could now be seen as evidence that the company is seeing efficiency gains.

The company eliminated more than 20,000 jobs in late 2022 and early 2023 as Zuckerberg declared a "year of efficiency," cutting non-technical roles, flattening management layers, and lifting what had been a sagging share price.

If Meta repeats a similar cycle for the AI era, it could set the mold for what a truly AI-first company could look like, Shmulik said.

"If one major player is able to redraw the blueprint for an AI-enabled organization, others will rush to replicate it... and we wonder if this could trigger a cascade of hurried pivots, half-formed strategies, and reactive restructuring across the ecosystem," he wrote.

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