Meta made $56.31 billion in Q1 2026. Up 33% year over year. Net income: $26.77 billion, up 61%. By most measures, the most profitable quarter in the company's history.

Three weeks later, Meta began cutting 8,000 employees.

The company also closed 6,000 open requisitions, bringing the effective headcount reduction to roughly 14,000 positions. About 10% of the workforce. Starting May 20. Not as a response to weak performance. As a deliberate reallocation.

That part is worth sitting with.

Source spread

• Fortune — Meta bumps capex to $145B [skeptic] — frames the capex raise as an investor-risk story; solid on the earnings-call context and Zuckerberg framing
• CNBC — Layoffs start this week [builder] — most detailed on the layoff mechanics and which teams are affected
• The Next Web — Record revenue, 8,000 cuts [skeptic] — leads with the dissonance between record profits and simultaneous headcount reduction
• TIKR — Q1 2026 earnings breakdown [builder] — detailed revenue and capex figures drawn directly from the 10-Q filing

The two cost centers

On the April 29 earnings call, Zuckerberg raised the 2026 capex ceiling to $125-145 billion — up from a prior forecast of $115-135 billion — nearly all of it for AI infrastructure: data centers, Nvidia GPUs, custom silicon, capacity for the Llama ecosystem and Meta's recommendation systems. That's roughly twice what Meta spent in 2025.

Per CNBC's reporting on the subsequent town hall, Zuckerberg framed the trade directly: "We basically have two major cost centers in the company: compute infrastructure and people-oriented things." With compute going up, people had to absorb the pressure.

Intuit, the same week, cut 3,000 workers while accelerating AI-powered QuickBooks and TurboTax workflows. Not the same scale. The same logic.

Pros & cons

What's real:

• Meta is not cutting because business is bad. Revenue is up 33%. The cuts are a deliberate budget decision to shift dollars from headcount to compute, and the earnings call made that explicit.
• The $145 billion capex ceiling is real and confirmed by filings. At that level of infrastructure commitment, even a highly profitable company has to find capacity somewhere.
• The Zuckerberg framing is unusually direct. Most profitable-company layoffs get dressed as "strategic realignment" or "focusing on core strengths." Naming compute and people as the two cost levers — and saying compute is winning — is a cleaner admission of the mechanism than most executives offer.
• The Intuit-in-the-same-week data point is not a coincidence in the way that two individual executives having the same idea is a coincidence. It's the same structural pressure reaching the same conclusion.

What deserves a side-eye:

• "Reallocation" is the polite framing. The engineers being cut are not interchangeable with GPU flops. You cannot replace the people who ran your growth products with the same capex dollars you're spending on inference infrastructure. These are different inputs to different parts of the business.
• The $145 billion capex ceiling assumes AI infrastructure spend will generate proportional returns. That assumption is currently unverified at this scale. Meta is making a very large bet on a trajectory that is still proving itself.
• Profitable-company layoffs during a record-revenue quarter will attract regulatory attention in Europe and potentially California. That's not a near-term production risk for Meta. It's a longer-term policy signal.
• Clustering — Intuit and Meta cutting the same week — is the pattern to watch. When the same logic runs through multiple major companies simultaneously, it becomes the labor market, not isolated corporate decisions.

Further reading

• Fortune — Meta bumps 2026 capex to $145B — full earnings call context and investor reaction
• CNBC — Meta layoffs start May 18 — most detailed on the layoff mechanics and Zuckerberg town hall framing
• The Next Web — Record revenue, 8,000 cuts — good on the dissonance between record profits and simultaneous headcount reduction
• TIKR — Meta Q1 2026 earnings breakdown — quarterly revenue and capex figures from filing data