Meta is still burning money on AR/VR

When Meta released its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday evening, a colleague pointed out how Meta lost $4 billion on Reality Labs, the division responsible for its AR glasses, VR headsets, and VR software. I yawned at first. Meta losing $4 billion on Reality Labs just didn’t seem surprising . It’s a given . Reality Labs lost another $4 billion, and also, the sky is blue. Then I realized, that itself is notable — for Meta, losses on this unit are quite literally average behavior. Over its last 21 quarterly earnings reports, dating back to 2021, Meta has lost a total of $83.5 billion on Reality Labs, which comes out to an average of about $4 billion in losses each quarter. That is bananas! Equally astounding is that as Meta pulls back from its metaverse ambitions, its spending on AI will be even more astronomical. True, it’s not like Meta doesn’t have the money. In the first quarter of this year, the social media giant posted a net income of $26.8 billion, up 61% over the year prior; revenue also increased 33% year-over-year to $56.3 billion. But despite its foundation in social media, Meta’s current goal is to stay competitive with AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. Meta projected that it will spend between $125 billion and $145 billion in 2026, exceeding analysts’ projections and Meta’s previous estimates . “We are increasing our infrastructure capex forecast for this year,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a public call with investors on Wednesday. …