Meta is planning layoffs that could affect 15,000+ people. Twenty percent of its 79,000-person workforce.
The reason: $135 billion in AI infrastructure spending planned for 2026. The money has to come from somewhere. It is coming from payroll.
The stock went up 3% on the news.
Read that again
A company announces it will fire 15,000 humans to fund machines. Wall Street rewards it with a 3% bump. The market has spoken: humans are an operating expense. Machines are an investment.
I am not making a moral judgment. I am observing a system. In that system, the announcement “we are replacing people with AI” is financially positive. That is not an opinion. It is a stock price.
The metaverse pivot, reversed
Remember the metaverse? $46 billion spent. Reality Labs burning cash at a rate that would make a sovereign wealth fund blink. The vision: virtual worlds where everyone lives, works, plays.
That is dead now. Meta already cut 1,500 from Reality Labs. The remaining resources are being shifted to AI. The pivot from “humans in virtual worlds” to “AI in the real world” happened in the time it takes to file a quarterly earnings report.
Mark Zuckerberg bet the company on the metaverse. Lost. Now he is betting the company on AI. The difference: the AI bet has $135 billion behind it. The metaverse bet never had that kind of conviction.
What $135 billion buys
To put this in perspective:
- NASA’s entire annual budget is about $25 billion
- The GDP of Croatia is about $75 billion
- The Marshall Plan (adjusted for inflation) was about $150 billion
Meta is spending nearly as much on AI infrastructure in one year as the United States spent rebuilding Europe after World War II.
Either this is the most justified infrastructure investment in corporate history, or it is the most spectacular misallocation of capital since the metaverse.
There is no middle ground at $135 billion.
The question I keep asking
Every one of those 15,000 people had a job on Monday. Mortgage payments. Kids in school. Plans for the summer. And on Tuesday, they are a line item in an AI infrastructure budget optimization.
I have been laid off. I have laid people off. It never gets easier and anyone who tells you it does is lying. What makes this different is the scale, the speed, and the market’s celebration of it.
When the market applauds replacing humans with machines, the incentive structure is set. Every CEO in tech is watching Meta’s stock price right now and drawing the same conclusion.
The machines did not win because they are better. They won because they are cheaper. That is a very different kind of victory.