Meta Smart Glasses Spending Approaches ‘Eye-Watering’ $100 Billion

Meta’s investments in virtual and augmented reality projects could reportedly exceed $100 billion this year.

This spending comes as CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees 2025 as the “defining year” for the company’s smart glasses, the Financial Times (FT) reported Monday (Feb. 3).

Meta last year invested nearly $20 billion in its Reality Labs unit last year, the report said, citing Meta’s annual report. That figure follows more than a decade of heavy losses and represents a new record in the lab’s spending, the report adds.

Reality Labs makes Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which Zuckerberg last week called a “real hit,” as well as its Quest VR headsets, which have been slower to catch on. A source told the FT Meta said 1 million sets of Ray-Bans last year.

So far, the company’s virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) spending has topped $80 billion since 2014, the year Meta purchased VR headset maker Oculus, the FT said, citing  analyst estimates and its own calculations based on company disclosures. This year, the company will add more than $20 billion to that figure, the report adds.

The FT notes this is part of Zuckerberg’s long-term plan to develop a computing platform that could replace smartphones and lessen his company’s reliance on Apple and Google to distribute its apps and services.

“Meta’s investments in Reality Labs are eye watering, yet it’s not clear if they are unreasonable if you believe it can build the business that it’s looking to be, which is replacing [Apple’s] iOS,” Matthew Ball, a tech investor and author of “The Metaverse,” told the FT.

The news follows reports from last week that Apple was shelving its smart glasses project following the tepid reaction to its virtual reality headset last year.

Zuckerberg has also called this a “defining year” for Meta’s artificial intelligence (AI) work, with plans to invest $60 billion to $65 billion in the effort this year.

Writing on Facebook earlier this month, the CEO said Meta is building a data center big enough to cover “a significant part of Manhattan,” will bring online 1 gigawatt of compute and will have more than 1.3 million GPUs by the year’s end.

“This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” Zuckerberg wrote.