Meta, 27 billion deal on AI. But could cut 20 per cent of employees

On the other hand, Nebius is one of the emerging players in this new ecosystem. The company is based in Amsterdam and was born in 2024 from the separation from the Russian internet group Yandex. Its business model is based on building data centres designed specifically for training artificial intelligence models, a market that is expanding rapidly with the spread of services such as chatbots and generative assistants.

The group also has a strategic partnership with Nvidia. And Nvidia itself announced a $2 billion investment in Nebius last week, helping to push the stock up on the stock exchange. The semiconductor manufacturer is supporting the growth of a new generation of cloud providers, the so-called 'neoclouds', which compete with the big players in the industry such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

The strategy is not without its critics. Some analysts observe that Nvidia is directly financing many of the companies that buy its chips, creating a kind of internal financial circuit that fuels demand for AI infrastructure. In January, the company already announced a $2 billion investment in the neocloud CoreWeave, while this year it participated with $30 billion in the financing of OpenAI and in a $2 billion round of the British Nscale.

Overall, the infrastructure race has become one of the pillars of the new AI economy. According to various market estimates, large technology companies could spend around USD 650 billion in 2026 to build data centres and purchase IT infrastructure in anticipation of an explosion in demand for AI-based services.

Meta is among the most aggressive companies on this front. Zuckerberg stated last year that the group will invest up to USD 600 billion in infrastructure in the US by 2028. The plan is mainly financed by advertising revenues from the group's platforms, but also includes the use of external funding.

The company has already launched several AI-based products. But this expansion strategy comes as the Menlo Park giant itself considers a possible significant reduction in its workforce. According to reports by Reuters, the company is reportedly preparing one of the largest rounds of layoffs in its recent history, with a cut of up to 20 per cent of its global workforce, or around 16,000 people.

Operational details and timelines have not yet been finalised, but senior management has reportedly already asked senior managers to draw up plans for staff reductions. Andy Stone, a company spokesman, described the information as 'a speculative account of theoretical approaches'. The possible cut, however, would come at a time of apparent financial strength for Meta, which ended 2025 with more than 78,000 employees and annual sales of more than $200 billion.

By 2025, Meta had already reduced about 5 per cent of its workforce. In the meantime, the group continues to reinforce its AI strategy with targeted acquisitions, including the start-up Manus, which specialises in algorithms for automating tasks, and Moltbook, a social platform where content is generated exclusively by artificial intelligence agents. The trajectory, in short, seems increasingly clear.