Companies Cut 100,000 Jobs. Then Spent $725 Billion on AI

286 layoffs in 2026 so far. 1,002 workers gone per day. The money did not disappear.

Cloudflare’s revenue grew 34% year over year in Q1 2026. Then it fired 1,100 people. Amazon cut 30,000 corporate jobs in six months and is spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure in the same year.

You are allowed to find that strange.

There is a pattern underneath all of this, and once you see it, the individual layoff announcements stop feeling like scattered events. They are one event, happening in waves.

What is actually happening in 2026

The numbers are not small.

As of mid-May, more than 102,000 tech workers have lost their jobs across 130 companies in 2026 alone, according to Layoffs.fyi and multiple tracking reports. April was the worst single month in two years, with over 45,000 cuts in one month. The industry is running at 1,002 job losses per day.

In 2025, companies directly attributed 55,000 job cuts to AI, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. That was more than 12 times the number of AI-attributed layoffs just two years earlier.

Nearly half of all tech layoffs in the first quarter of 2026 were attributed, at least in part, to reduced need…