Meta's Zuckerberg plans aggressive hiring, rising compensation in 2025–26 for 'superintelligence' goal

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has unequivocally expressed that the company’s hiring spree will continue in the remaining calendar year, as well as in 2026, as he aims to bolster his Artificial Intelligence (AI) ambitions. Zuckerberg is aggressively spending on his vision to develop "superintelligence", which he calls "AI that surpasses human intelligence in every way".

"Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives," Zuckerberg said.

During the Quarter 2 earnings call of 2025, the tech entrepreneur stated, "Our approach to adding headcount continues to be targeted at the company’s highest priority areas. We expect talent additions across all of our priority areas will continue to drive overall headcount growth through this year and 2026".

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Meta has expected an increase in expenditure in the range of $144-118 billion in 2025, fuelled by employees compensation.

Zuckerberg and Meta's Chief Financial Officer Susan Li mentioned that they are expecting 'employee compensation' to be the second-largest growth driver in 2025, after infrastructure.

"So a lot is going on, on the infrastructure side, as it contributes to the 2026 total expense number. After that, employee compensation is the next largest driver of expense growth in ’26, again, driven primarily in the investments that we’re making in technical talent, including recognizing a full year of compensation expense for the AI talent we hire this year," according to Li.

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Li added that Meta will be onboarding technical talents in "priority areas" in the current calendar year, and added, "We also have some visibility into the compensation expense growth that we’ll recognize from the AI talent that we’re hiring this year".

Meta, the parent firm of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, total headcount stood at over 75,900 in the April-June quarter (Q2 2025)--1% drop quarter-over-quarter. The California-based social media company attributed the drop to performance-led reductions earlier this year.

However, the employee count decline was partially offset by continued hiring in areas such as monetization, infrastructure, Reality Labs, AI, as well as regulation and compliance, Meta added.