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Total investment of the target in the virtual and expanded reality this year should be the highest $ 100 billion, as its executive director Mark Zuckerberg declared 2025 years old, will be a “year” for his smart glasses.
In his latest annual report, Meta revealed that he invested $ 19.9 billion in his Labs Division Reality last year, a new maximum after more than a decade of major losses. Unit develops its meta-ban target of smart glassesWhat Zuckerberg called “a real hit” last week, as well as his pursuits of the VR headsets, which flew more slowly. The company sold 1 mn sets of its glasses Ray-Ban 2024, according to a person introduced to this issue.
The cumulative investment of the company based in the silicon valley in the development and acquisitions of VR and ar products have now exceeded $ 80 billion since the initiative began in 2014 when she purchased the OCULUS VR header manufacturer, according to analysts and calculating the financial Times based on the publication of the company.
TargetThe annual report is said to be expected to increase their annual division investments in 2025, suggesting that more than $ 20 billion will be added this year this year.
Data show the extraordinary costs of the long -term effort of Zuckerberg to build a new computer platform that could one day replace smartphones and reduce Meta’s dependence on Apple and Google’s distribution devices to distribute its applications and services. As part of this, the target is racing to develop sophisticated AR glasses that cover content in the real world, discovering their prototype Orion in September while the Apple and Google rivals work on similar products.
“The target of investment in reality laboratories are watery of the eyes, but it is not clear if they are unreasonable if you believe it can build a job as it looks, which is a replacement [Apple’s] IOS, “said Matthew Ball, Technology Investor and author of the book Metaverse.
The target refused to comment.
Three years after a Facebook mother’s home company reworked as a target to highlight its vision of the construction of “Metaverse” or the Internet Virtual World, reality Labs brought $ 2.1 billion in revenue 2024, which is more than 13 percent compared to the previous year . Her operational losses reached a new maximum of $ 17.7 billion last year, which is more than 10 percent.
The unit generated $ 10.1 billion in revenue since 2019, the first year in which the target began to discover financial results for it.
Over the past year, Zuckerberg has moved the focus from the conversation of Metar’s creation filled with Avatar to achieve progress in the development of smart glasses powered in the rapid development of AI technology.
In Meta’s invitation on Wednesday, he was delighted with the prospects for his “AI glasses”, which were produced in partnership with the home company Ray-Ban Essilorluxottica.
“This will be a decisive year that determines if we are on the road to hundreds of millions and finally, billions of AI glasses, and glasses are the next computer platform as we talked for a while – or whether this is just a longer grinding,” he said .
Lightweight glasses have built -in small cameras, microphones and speakers, allowing the user to photograph, listen to music and talk to the auxiliary AI. Meta plans to post a new version later this year, which has a small screen for the first time, reported FT earlier.
His pursuit headphones, which cost $ 300 or more for the latest model, are still struggling to achieve the main attraction, and the analysts and programmers of the games who estimate about 30 million units to date have been sold. Zuckerberg said the number of people using quest devices and horizon operating system is “growing constantly”.
Ball said the target of tens of billions of dollars are losses from VR -ai ar are not different in proportions with other efforts of large technological companies to enter new categories of products, comparing it to Microsoft with his Bing asking, Amazon’s assistants of Alex and Echo devices Google’s cloud computing unit.
He estimated that the cumulative loss of Meta’s business so far in real laboratories amounted to $ 75 billion, compared to more than $ 50 billion for Amazon’s Alex and over $ 30 billion for Apple’s VR and AR Development, including his Vision Pro headphones, more expensive Rival Meta in search.
“A lot of attention is paid to Zuckerberg’s bet on the laboratory of reality, but this is partly because they decided to report discretely,” Ball said. “All their competitors have investments that are comparable not to surface.”
The target of investments in the lab is less than “hundreds of billions of dollars” that Zuckerberg said he had planned to spend on AI infrastructure “long -term”.
Despite these strenuous efforts, the target remains very profitable thanks to its lucrative business with online advertising. The net income increased by 60 percent last year to $ 62.4 billion.
