Meta has begun laying off 8,000 employees around the world.

The company plans to cut around 10 percent of its staff, as it looks to free up cash flow for increased data center spend. Plans to hire 6,000 workers have been canceled, while another 7,000 employees are set to be reassigned to new AI initiatives. Employees will see their work keylogged and tracked to train AI systems.

Company capital expenditures are forecast to hit $125bn to $145bn for the year, more than double last year's.

Despite the record data center buildout, a number of data center employees were laid off in the latest round of layoffs. Among them are data center capacity engineers with 13 years of experience at Meta, directors of data center facilities engineering with eight years, data center site managers with seven years, and site ops data center production operations engineers with three years.

Also leaving this week is Dan Rabinovitsj, VP of hardware/AI systems infrastructure engineering. Rabinovitsj resigned ahead of the layoffs and led 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."