Opening Claim Meta cut roughly 8,000 staff and Mark Zuckerberg has linked the decision, in part, to the cost of building AI infrastructure. That framing matters more than the headcount number. When the CEO of a company spending tens of billions a year on GPUs, data centres, and model training tells investors that AI costs contributed to layoffs, he is describing a balance sheet trade. Compute capacity is being purchased with payroll. This is not a story about AI taking jobs in the cinematic sense. No agent walked into an office and replaced a manager. The mechanism is duller and more important: capital expenditure on AI systems is now large enough to force structural cuts in operating expenses. Salaries are the largest controllable line item in most software companies. When AI capex climbs into the $60-80 billion range annually, something on the opex side has to give. For anyone building or buying AI systems, this is the signal worth reading.…