Social media giant Meta is continuing to ramp up its investment in IT infrastructure while simultaneously reducing its workforce.

During the company's recent Q1 2026 earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li told investors that as the company grows its infrastructure spending, it remains "committed to operating efficiently, and we recently shared internally that we plan to reduce the size of our employee base in May."

The company ended Q1 with around 77,900 employees, approximately one percent fewer than the quarter prior, but did not disclose the extent of workforce reduction expected for this quarter.

Capex for the quarter was $19.8bn, driven mainly by investments in servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. Meta has increased its planned capex for the full year to be in the range of $125 billion to $145 billion, up from the previously expected $120bn to $135bn. According to CFO Li, this "reflects our expectations for higher component pricing this year and, to a lesser extent, additional data center costs to support future-year capacity."

Speaking on the increased spend, Li explained: "We are investing aggressively to meet our infrastructure needs and ensure we maximize our strategic flexibility over the coming years. This includes substantially expanding our own data center footprint and striking deals throughout the supply chain to secure necessary components for future capacity.

"We are also signing cloud deals that will come online over the course of this year through 2027, allowing us to scale more quickly. These multiyear cloud deals and our infrastructure purchase agreements drove a $107 billion step up in our contractual commitments this quarter."

Certainly, this is no surprise, with Meta having set up a division dedicated to growing its AI data center ambitions called Meta Compute in January 2026, with the goal of developing tens of gigawatts of compute within the decade. Since then, the company has broken ground on a data center in Oklahoma, filed for an additional 12 buildings at its campus in El Paso, Texas, and has signed an agreement to develop in Beloit, Wisconsin.

The company has also been undertaking significant leasing behavior, with reports in March suggesting that Meta has some $104bn in future lease commitments.

On the cloud commitment side, Meta has signed several large agreements this year so far, including with AWS, CoreWeave, and Nebius.

The company declined to provide a specific outlook for spend in 2027, but CFO Li said that "we are frankly undergoing a very dynamic planning process ourselves as we are working through what our capacity needs will be over the coming years. Our experience so far has been that we have continued to underestimate our compute needs even as we have been ramping capacity significantly, as the advances in AI have continued."

As spending increases, the company is also turning to its own custom hardware in the aim of increasing the efficiency of its investments. CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained: "We are very focused on increasing the efficiency of our investments, and as part of that, we are rolling out more than one gigawatt of our own custom silicon that we are developing with Broadcom, as well as a significant amount of AMD chips to complement the new Nvidia systems that we are rolling out as well."

With spending increasing, naturally, debt is also high. At the end of Q1, Meta finished with $81.2bn in cash and marketable securities, and $58.7bn in debt. The day after the earnings call, on April 30, Meta sold a further $25bn in bonds spread over six tranches, the soonest due in 2031 and the latest in 2066, with between a 4.55 percent and 6.45 percent rate.

Other key performance metrics for Meta this quarter include revenue, which was $56.3bn, up 29 percent on a constant currency basis, Year-on-Year. Total expenses for the quarter, meanwhile, were $33.4bn.

At the time of writing, Meta's share price is down 8.55 percent.