Meta is considering laying off more than 20 percent of its staff as it plans to spend $600bn on data centers by 2028.

Executives at the company, which employed 79,000 people as of 31 December, are still considering the scale of the cuts, Reuters reports. No date has yet been set for the layoffs.

The company laid off 11,000 staffers in November 2022, and followed that with another 10,000 cuts in a period CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the “year of efficiency.”

At the time, the company said that it was cutting back after a Covid-era hiring spree, and trimming spending on the metaverse.

Since then, Meta has substantially ramped up spending on AI data centers, repeatedly increasing its investment as it funds gigawatt sites.

Zuckerberg has spent heavily on recruiting AI talent, including spending approximately $14.8 billion on a 49 percent stake in data labeling firm Scale AI and hiring its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead a new superintelligence lab. The company has spent hundreds of millions to hire single individuals.

Alongside its own gigawatt data center construction projects, Meta reportedly signed a $10bn+ cloud deal with Google in August, followed by a $14.2bn CoreWeave deal last September, a $3bn Nebius contract in November, and is in talks with Oracle for a $20bn contract.

To fund its 2GW Hyperion data center, the company entered into a $27bn joint venture with Blue Owl Capital, with the latter company covering 80 percent of the cost.

Despite the heavy investment, Meta's AI efforts have failed to meet internal expectations. The New York Times reports that its new “Avocado” AI model underperformed, and Meta is considering temporarily deploying Google's Gemini.

The potential job cuts at Meta come as Oracle plans to cut thousands of employees to help fund its own data center buildout.