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The company is tightening funding for its VR, AR and metaverse division, Reality Labs. report Thursday.
The Information, citing a former Reality Labs manager, said the division’s hardware team is being asked to cut spending by nearly 20% between this year and 2026.
The division has been cutting staff over the past year, primarily at mid- and senior-level positions, with more than a dozen vice presidents and directors being cut last month, The Information reported.
Mehta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meta has spent more than $40 billion on Zuckerberg’s heavily funded project, the Metaverse. The Information reports that Meta’s CFO told the unit earlier this year that it should target the trillion-dollar opportunity in AR and VR. Meta currently sells its Quest series of headsets and Meta RayBans AI glasses, but it is also releasing premium AR glasses soon.
During a conference call with analysts last year, Meta’s CEO said the metaverse was a “very long-term bet.”
“I can’t guarantee that this bet will be right,” he said. “I think this is the direction the world is heading.”
But when Zuckerberg declared 2023 to be Meta’s “year of efficiency,” he noted that Reality Labs, like other divisions, will be subject to cost-cutting measures.
“We’re looking at Signal and learning what makes sense to do going forward,” he said last year. “We’re constantly changing how we execute. Other things, like flattening our organizational structure, will impact the whole company, both across Reality Labs and the family of apps. We want to be more efficient at what we do.”
Zuckerberg said Facebook will change its name to Meta in 2021 and become a “metaverse company.”
“Going forward, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first,” he said at the time.