Big Tech plans $740 billion in AI spending while announcing over 118,000 layoffs
Companies announced a 69 percent jump in capital expenditures while cutting more than 118,000 jobs. Adoption of AI tools reached 18 percent of U.S. firms by the end of 2025.
Com. Meta announced plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, and to cancel hiring for 6,000 open positions. The company said the moves were intended to run operations more efficiently and offset other investments.
Microsoft offered thousands of employees a voluntary buyout described as the largest the company has ever offered. It is also cancelling most direct Claude Code licenses and shifting to GitHub Copilot CLI. Uber chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga said the company exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget by April after introducing leaderboards to encourage employee adoption.
Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios in April that for his team the cost of compute exceeds the cost of employees. An MIT study from 2024 found AI automation would be economically viable in only 23 percent of roles where vision is a primary task, with human labor remaining cheaper in the remaining 77 percent of cases.
fyi, already exceeding the roughly 120,000 cuts recorded for all of 2025.
9 trillion. Fees for AI software rose between 20 percent and 37 percent over the past year, according to spending management firm Tropic. Federal Reserve data shows 18 percent of companies had adopted AI tools by the end of 2025, a 68 percent increase since September 2025.
A Gartner report last month estimated that the cost of inference for a large language model with one trillion parameters will fall more than 90 percent over the next four years. com the current gap reflects a short-term mismatch driven by hardware and energy costs, and that future viability will require both lower prices and greater reliability at scale.
