No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalised, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.
Top executives have recently signalled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. The sources spoke anonymously because they were not authorised to disclose the cuts.
Meta did not immediately comment.
If Meta settles on the 20 per cent figure, the layoffs will be the company's most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the "year of efficiency".
It employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest filing. The company laid off 11,000 staffers in November 2022, or around 13 per cent of its workforce at the time. Around four months later, it announced it was cutting another 10,000 jobs.
Over the past year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to compete more forcefully in generative AI. The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to court top AI researchers to a new superintelligence team.
The company has said it plans to invest $US600 billion ($A856 billion) to build data centres by 2028. Earlier this week, it acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents. Meta is also spending at least $US2 billion ($A2.9 billion) to buy Chinese AI startup Manus, Reuters previously reported.
Zuckerberg has alluded to efficiency gains from the investments, saying in January he was starting to see "projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person".
Meta's plans reflect a broader pattern among major US companies, particularly in tech, this year. Executives have pointed to recent improvements in AI systems as one reason for the changes.
In January, Amazon confirmed it would cut some 16,000 jobs, amounting to nearly 10 per cent of its workforce.
In February, the fintech company Block chopped nearly half of its staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly pointing to AI tools and their growing capability to help companies do more with smaller teams.
