Mark Zuckerberg lays off 8,000 employees, spends $130B on AI

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a message for anyone anxious about AI taking their job: the technology is actually hiring. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal hours before Meta's June quarter earnings, Zuckerberg said that "all the work around AI has net created a lot of jobs because there's all this infrastructure that needs to get created," adding that fears of mass displacement haven't "played out the way that people feared it might."It's a claim that invites an obvious question, because the company making it spent this year doing the opposite. Meta laid off 8,000 employees—about 10 per cent of its workforce—in May as part of an AI-first restructuring, reassigned another 7,000 to AI initiatives, and is on track to spend between $130 billion and $145 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, roughly double last year's outlay. Zuckerberg isn't wrong that AI is creating jobs.