Mark Zuckerberg Signals End To Heavy Reality Labs Losses As Meta Pushes AI Glasses

Mark Zuckerberg has suggested that Meta’s long-loss-making Reality Labs division could be nearing a turning point, following deep job cuts and a strategic refocus earlier this year.

Speaking on Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call, the chief executive said the company expects to “gradually reduce” the scale of losses at Reality Labs as it moves investment away from virtual reality and leans more heavily into AI-powered glasses and wearables.

Zuckerberg cautioned that the shift would not deliver immediate results. Reality Labs posted losses of more than $19 billion in 2025 alone, but he expressed confidence that the division’s financial trajectory is beginning to stabilise.

Mark Zuckerberg: Reality Labs losses may be nearing their peak

“For Reality Labs, we are directing most of our investment towards glasses and wearables going forward, while focusing on making Horizon a massive success on mobile and making VR a profitable ecosystem over the coming years,” Zuckerberg said.

“I expect Reality Labs losses this year to be similar to last year, and this will likely be the peak, as we start to gradually reduce our losses going forward.”

Earlier this month, Meta cut more than 1,000 jobs from Reality Labs, closed three virtual reality studios and confirmed plans to retire its VR meetings app. The company has also paused plans to support third-party headsets running Horizon OS.

Meta pivots from VR to AI smart glasses

Rather than expanding its VR footprint, Meta is now concentrating on smart glasses and wearables that align more closely with Zuckerberg’s push towards AI “superintelligence”.

During the earnings call, Zuckerberg said sales of Meta’s smart glasses “more than tripled” in 2025 and hinted at more ambitious augmented reality plans.

“They [AI glasses] are going to be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you and help you as you go about your day and even show you information or generate custom UI right there in your vision,” he said.

Horizon and AI: reshaping Meta’s immersive future

Zuckerberg also outlined how Meta’s existing virtual reality work could blend with AI, particularly within the Horizon platform.

“You can imagine … people being able to easily, through a prompt, create a world or create a game, and be able to share that with people who they care about. And you see it in your feed, and you can jump right into it, and you can engage in it,” he said.

“And there are 3D versions of that, and there are 2D versions of that. And Horizon, I think fits very well with the kind of immersive 3D version of that.”

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He added that future content could become more interactive across devices. “But there’s definitely a version of the future where, you know, any video that you see, you can, like, tap on and jump into it and, like, engage and kind of like, experience it in a more meaningful way.”

According to Zuckerberg, Meta’s investments in VR software and Horizon are positioned to work alongside AI advances, helping bring immersive experiences “to hundreds of millions and billions of people through mobile”.

Notably absent from his remarks, however, was a once-central term: the “metaverse”.

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