Meta announced AI capital spending of $115 to $135 billion for 2026, nearly double what it spent last year. At the same time, the company is cutting roughly 8,000 employees and canceling 6,000 open roles. They're also creating new titles like "AI builder" and "AI pod lead" under a newly appointed Chief AI Officer.
This is the clearest real-world example yet of what AI-driven workforce change looks like at a major company. It's not a future scenario. It's happening right now at one of the largest employers in tech.
I'm not going to tell you whether that's good or bad. But if you're in tech and you're not asking yourself how AI affects your specific role, you're behind. Meta is being pretty explicit about where it thinks the value is going. The question is whether the new jobs they're creating actually absorb the people they're letting go. History says probably not, at least not at the same pay or the same scale.
The EU AI Act Deadline Is Still Coming, Ready or Not
European lawmakers just wrapped a 12-hour negotiating session in Strasbourg with nothing to show for it. No deal on the broader Omnibus package. But the August 2, 2026 deadline for high-risk AI systems is still locked in. If you're using AI in hiring, performance management, or termination decisions and you operate in the EU, that deadline applies to you.
Companies that were hoping Brussels would kick the can got bad news this week. The politicians couldn't agree on the big picture, but the specific AI Act timeline didn't move.
If you've been sitting on your compliance work, now is the time to actually start it. August is three months out. That's not much runway to audit your HR systems, document your models, and put the required processes in place. The companies that got ahead of this six months ago are going to be fine. Everyone else is in for a rough summer.
India Now Rivals San Francisco for AI Engineering Talent
LinkedIn data shows India's AI engineering hiring is up 59.5% year over year, ahead of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Bengaluru now matches San Francisco at about 3% of LinkedIn members tagged as AI engineers. That's not a rounding error. That's a real shift.
For years the assumption was that serious AI talent was concentrated in a few US cities. That's no longer the case, and it has real implications for where companies hire and how they build teams.
If you're a US-based company and you haven't built any presence in India, you're competing against companies that have. That matters for cost, for timezone coverage, and for access to a talent pool that is growing faster than ours right now. This is one of the more underreported stories in AI this year.