Meta’s sweeping layoffs announced last month hit 1,395 employees in King County, per a recent state filing last week.

While Meta is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., the company maintains a significant presence in the Seattle area. Meta’s Puget Sound hub grew rapidly during the pandemic — reaching a local head count of 8,800 employees at some point — as the company focused its virtual reality efforts in the area.

The layoffs affect 259 employees across two Seattle offices, 699 workers at a Bellevue office and 206 at a Redmond office, plus 231 remote workers statewide. Engineering and product manager roles were hit the hardest.

The tech giant let go of the employees on May 20, though their official separation date will be July 22, according to a worker adjustment and retraining notification sent to the Washington State Employment Security Department on Friday.

Their severance packages include 16 weeks of base pay, plus two additional weeks for every year of continuous service.

“The changes we are implementing vary by team and include layoffs, open role closures, and moving thousands of employees to business critical priorities across the company,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said Tuesday.

Last month, employees learned that 8,000 workers, or 10% of Meta’s labor force, would be laid off as the company seeks to be a leader on the forefront of artificial intelligence.

Meta isn’t alone in throwing around AI while cutting thousands of workers. The industry’s yearlong layoff spree isn’t necessarily a case of fully automating work and replacing employees with digital robots. Rather, tech’s spending on AI infrastructure— mostly in the form of data centers and advanced computer chips — is surpassing record levels of capital investments. And those numbers keep ballooning.

This year, Meta estimates it will spend between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI-related investments, the company said during an earnings call in April. Each side of that projection is about $10 billion more than Meta estimated going into 2026.

Other companies like Redmond-based Microsoft have linked their capital expenditure costs to layoffs and other workforce reduction measures. After spending $88 billion in its 2025 fiscal year — which ended on June 30, 2025 — the company plans to spend more than $140 billion during its current fiscal year, which ends in just over a month.

Last year, Microsoft laid off about 15,000 employees over multiple waves. This month, the company offered buyouts to another 8,750 employees.

But tech companies are also saying the job cuts and shuttered projects over the past year are driven by a need to stay nimble and efficient as they try to outpace each other in the AI race.

Amazon, which is on track to spend more than $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, laid off 30,000 employees between October and January. The company said its layoffs have nothing to do with capital expenses, but rather driven by CEO Andy Jassy’s crusade against bureaucracy.

Meta has framed its layoffs by the need to shift resources to AI, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the “the most consequential technology of our lifetimes,” in a note to employees last week.

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Zuckerberg’s shifted priorities were evident this year, when Meta laid off hundreds of employees in its Reality Labs division, the money-burning segment of the company devoted to virtual reality and the metaverse. After rebranding the company formerly known as Facebook to Meta in 2021, Reality Labs lost $76.9 billion through 2025. By comparison, Meta’s family of apps division — a collection of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp — has made more than $352 billion since 2021.

The Reality Labs cuts affected 331 Seattle area employees in January, many of whom were in engineering and product manager roles. Two months later, Reality Labs was hit with more layoffs, affecting more than 160 in the Seattle area.

Since October, when Meta last had sweeping companywide layoffs, the company has let go of almost 2,000 Seattle-area workers, including last week’s layoffs, adding to thousands laid off by other tech companies.

Between Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, more than 9,700 Seattle area tech workers have lost their job since May 2025, along with hundreds of others at smaller companies.

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