More than two dozen workers of Meta have sued the company over the alleged use of AI to target workers with medical conditions for layoffs as it sheds thousands of jobs.
The suit claims that Meta relied on factors like productivity and AI token usage when deciding who to lay off earlier this year. This criteria, it adds, put people who missed work due to medical conditions or to care for family members in disadvantage.
Plaintiffs are looking to get a preliminary ruling to prevent Meta from completing the layoffs while they continue their claims in private arbitration. Reuters noted that workers say Meta's agreements require employees to arbitrate workplace disputes individually. The requests for temporary relief don't apply, they say.
A Meta spokesperson rejected the claims: "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI," the spokesperson said.
Meta's layoffs are impacting about 10% of its workforce. The company told employees that the decision is "art of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making."
The finance head of the company, Susan Li, said during the earnings call from the first quarter that leadership doesn't "really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future."
The company ended the first quarter of 2026 with 77,900 employees, down 1% on the final quarter of 2025, following earlier rounds of redundancies. Those previous cuts were pitched as a way to streamline operations after heavy spending on the metaverse. This time, executives are far more explicit that jobs are being traded for computing power.
Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said "we are seeing more and more examples where one or two people are building something in a week that would have previously taken dozens of people months."
At the same time, the company is dramatically expanding its largest artificial intelligence infrastructure project, increasing the planned investment in its Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana to more than $50 billion as the company races to build the computing power needed for its AI ambitions.
The social media giant announced Monday that its Hyperion campus in Richland Parish will grow into a 5 gigawatt (GW) AI data center, more than doubling the original 2 GW plan unveiled last year. The revised price tag also far exceeds previous estimates, rising from the $27 billion announced in October to more than $50 billion.
The Louisiana project has become the centerpiece of Meta's AI infrastructure strategy. Zuckerberg previously described Hyperion as a supercluster capable of scaling to 5 GW over several years, giving Meta what he called industry-leading computing capacity for AI research.
