Meta begins job cuts in Israel as global layoffs in the name of AI mount

Silicon Valley tech titan that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is letting go of about 90 employees in Israel as part of round of layoffs to cut 10% of global headcount

Dozens of Meta Israel employees received dismissal notices on Wednesday, as the US tech titan embarked on a wave of layoffs aimed at trimming 10 percent of its global workforce to offset investing billions of dollars toward AI infrastructure.

As part of the global layoffs, Meta is slated to fire about 90 employees, or 10% of its workforce in Israel, primarily from its development center in Tel Aviv. The layoffs in Israel are in line with widely reported plans by Meta to cut about 8,000 employees, or 10% of global headcount.

Meta employs about 900 workers locally and operates two offices in Tel Aviv — a business hub and an R&D center established in 2013. The R&D center is one of the largest strategic development centers for the tech giant outside the US. The Tel Aviv teams develop strategic technology initiatives for Meta worldwide, including generative AI. Meta in Israel also runs a startup growth program.

The Silicon Valley tech titan that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is the latest tech heavyweight to announce fresh rounds of job cuts to tighten operations in the new automation era. This month, networking giant Cisco said 4,000 jobs would be slashed as it channeled more resources to AI, following in the footsteps of Microsoft and Coinbase, which also announced layoffs.

The wave of layoffs is also sweeping through startups and smaller tech firms in Israel.

“We are seeing startups and tech companies that are trying to use the adoption of AI as a trigger to downsize the number of workers, slim their teams, and become more efficient, which they can do, but they should do it with a plan ahead,” Tal Aspir, Head of the AI Lab at the BDO consulting firm, told The Times of Israel. “There are startups that give their developers permission to work with AI without supervision and by that they can cause damage because there are aspects of security, privacy, and efficiency.”

“Human experts are still needed to supervise the integration and output of AI models,” said Aspir.

Alongside the global layoffs, Meta is shifting 7,000 employees into new AI roles as part of the broader restructuring.

The move comes as co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg makes a priority of delivering “superintelligence” in a costly AI race against rivals including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Meta has been spending heavily on AI infrastructure and high compensation for employees, such as those working in its Meta Superintelligence Labs, which released its first AI model called Muse Spark earlier this month.

The company’s pivot to focus on AI has angered its workforce, who were informed last month that Meta would be installing new tracking software on the computers of its US-based employees to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its AI models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, according to internal memos seen by Reuters.

Employees distributed flyers at multiple US offices earlier this month to protest the installation of mouse-tracking software. It was the most visible sign to date of a nascent labor movement brewing inside the social media giant, as at least some staffers began to channel their rage over the company’s plans to reshape its workforce around AI into labor-organizing efforts.

“Even if AI isn’t replacing people, it is changing the nature of their work,” said Aspir. “On the management and operational side, businesses can cut down by using AI as a support system to do things faster and more efficiently, but for the decision-making process, they still need a human supervisor.”

“On the operational side — meaning administrative and marketing roles, as well as low-level developers — we are seeing companies downsizing departments by 10% to 30% as humans can be more efficient because of the use of AI,” Aspir added.

Aspir added that AI use in knowledge-intensive industries, such as high-tech, is much higher than in production.

Earlier this week, Israel-based AI startup AI21 Labs, a natural language processing (NLP) startup, announced a major organizational restructuring, cutting about 60% of its staff, according to reports in the Hebrew press. The deep cuts will leave mainly experienced research and product development staff on their own to develop its Maestro AI agent management system and to improve the algorithms of its language models.

“While we will see more layoffs ahead by startups, in a few months, we will see recruitment not of low-level developers, but more experienced developers who can supervise AI models and their outcomes,” said Aspir. “For young people coming out of universities, it is going to be a tough period of time to find jobs as companies can use AI models for entry-level or low-level developers and will be looking for AI expert hires such as AI engineers.”

Agencies contributed to this report.