Even Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — is confronting its own limits. During an internal meeting held on Thursday, July 2, founder Mark Zuckerberg shared a far from reassuring assessment with his team: the development of artificial intelligence agents is not moving at the speed the company had anticipated. It is a rare admission of difficulty from one of the most aggressive competitors in the global AI race.

In the digital world, particularly at the major technology companies, a sweeping transition toward AI-based automated tools is underway. It is a complex transformation that does not happen overnight, even for Silicon Valley giants. According to Reuters, which reviewed a recording of the meeting, Zuckerberg acknowledged that over the past four months, AI agent development has not accelerated in the way the company expected. That statement carries real weight, given that the entire corporate reorganization of recent months was justified precisely on the promise of that acceleration.

$650–725 billion: the biggest tech infrastructure bet in history

Meta expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone — a figure already revised upward from an earlier estimate of $115–135 billion, due to rising costs and expanding data center capacity. That number sits within an even broader context: the four Big Tech giants — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft — have collectively committed between $650 and $725 billion in capital expenditure for 2026. This is the largest infrastructure investment ever recorded in a single year in the history of the technology sector.

Meta cut 8,000 jobs at the start of 2026

The push for greater agility and automation also drove Meta to take drastic action. At the beginning of the year, the company laid off 8,000 employees — roughly 10% of its administrative workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to divisions focused on artificial intelligence. Taken together, these moves affected nearly one-fifth of the company’s total headcount. During the meeting, however, Zuckerberg admitted that the cuts had not been handled as cleanly as they should have been and that the timing of the reorganization had been miscalculated. The decision stemmed from a fear, widely shared among senior leadership, that the company would not be able to adapt quickly enough to shifts in the technology sector.

The human cost of this transformation has been documented by multiple investigative reports, which describe Meta’s new AI unit as a grueling workplace for engineers operating under mounting pressure to deliver results on ever-tightening timelines.

Investors watching the clock

Despite the difficulties, Zuckerberg refused to change course and told his team to expect concrete signs of improvement within the next three to six months. Whether Meta’s team — under intensifying pressure — can sustain the pace the founder is demanding before investor patience runs out remains to be seen.

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Alessandro Nuzzo on July 04, 2026 as «Meta, l’allarme di Zuckerberg: “Temiamo di non adattarci abbastanza in fretta”». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.