Zuckerberg cuts Meta employee bonuses by 5%, follows 10% reduction last year, despite AI splurge — $130 billion capex vision and eye-watering AI pay packages force efficiency elsewhere in the business

Meta has reportedly reduced the stock options that staff received by 5%, following a 10% reduction in the same bonus from the year before. According to the Financial Times, this move comes as the company is spending billions of dollars on capital expenditures while also offering salaries of up to $2 million, $100 million bonuses, and even a reported $1.25 billion offer to a particular individual to shore up its AI talent.

The company calls its stock option awards equity refreshers, and they’re given to most of its employees on top of base salaries and annual cash bonuses. The equity award is adjusted based on industry trends, but Meta still aims to deliver one of the largest pay packages in its area. Despite the stock cuts, it has also revamped its performance review system, with the highest achievers reportedly getting a larger reward. Because of this, the company’s overall remuneration is actually expected to increase even with the reduction in bonuses.

Meta is pushing to outcompete OpenAI, Google, xAI, among others, to develop the most advanced large language models (LLMs) and eventually build its own artificial general intelligence. So, aside from the large amounts of money it’s throwing at AI engineers and scientists, it’s also going big on AI infrastructure.

In 2025, it announced a plan to spend at least $65 billion on data centers, including a 2GW site with over 1.3 million Nvidia AI GPUs. It also started putting these AI processors in tents for faster deployment, with Zuckerberg announcing a data center site that’s as big as Manhattan. To power all these projects, Meta inked a deal for 6 gigawatts of nuclear power earlier this year — enough to deliver the electricity needs of 5 million homes.

But even as Mark Zuckerberg is pushing headfirst into AI, investors are getting jittery about the amount of money being spent on the technology. Because of this, the company is also trimming its less performant units. In January 2026, its metaverse division slashed 1,500 jobs, while it also let go of about 8,000 workers last year — a part of the 100,000 tech industry positions caught in layoffs as of mid-2025.

There were some complaints in Meta’s anonymous employee messaging board about the bonus cuts. “Another reduction. I guess that’s what I get for trying! Bye Meta!” one comment said, as per the Financial Times. Another one wrote, “Cutting my work hours 5%.” Nevertheless, the company still has one of the best pay packages in the industry. If you pair that with the uncertainty of white-collar jobs over the threat of AI, it’s unlikely that Meta will see a mass exodus of its workers anytime soon.

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