Square Loans: $7 Billion Funded in 2025, Block Lays Off 40% of All Staff Due to AI

Square Loans finished 2025 with a whopping $7 billion funded to merchants. And just as has been the case previously, payment performance on these loans has been so good that “the amount of loans that were identified as nonperforming loans was immaterial,” according to the year-end report.

Despite Square Loans being the largest originator of online business loans in the country that deBanked tracks, the product is merely a value-add to its parent company’s (Block) merchant processing and point-of-sale business. Block’s year-end figures were overshadowed by the announcement that it was laying off 40% of its staff on the basis that AI has unlocked new efficiencies that no longer require such a high headcount. Layoffs amounted to more than 4,000 employees in a single day.

“We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble,” Company CEO Jack Dorsey wrote on X following the news. “Our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.”