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This year, the total investment of meta virtual reality and expansion of expansion has declared that this year’s highest executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, declared that it will be a “decisive year” for smart glasses in 2025. It is set to be.
The latest annual report revealed that Meta invested $ 19.9 billion in Reality Labs Division last year, and has reached a new high after more than 10 years. The unit develops a Ray-Ban Meta smart glass that Zuckerberg has called “Real Hit” last week, and a quick quest VR headset. According to those who are familiar with this issue, the company sold 1 million sets of Ray -Ban glasses in 2024.
According to Financial Times, which is based on analyst estimation and Financial Times’s disclosure, the cumulative investment of the company’s based on Silicon Valley, the development and acquisition of the company, purchased the VR headset maker Oculus. It has been more than $ 800 billion since it started in 2014.
The annual report of the meta expects the annual investment in the department to increase further in 2025, suggesting that more than $ 20 billion will be added this year.
This number is an extraordinary effort of Zuckerberg’s long -term efforts to build a new computing platform that can reduce the dependence on Apple and Google devices to exchange smartphones and distribute apps and services. It shows the cost. As part of this, Zuckerberg is competing for a prototype orion in September, as Apple and Google are working on similar products, and competes to develop more sophisticated AR glasses in the real world. Masu.
“Meta investment in real labs is noticeable, but if you believe that you can build a business you want, it’s not clear if they are irrational.
Meta refused to comment.
Three years after Facebook’s parent company remodeled as a meta, the reality lab, which emphasizes the vision or online virtual world of building a “meta harassment”, has made a profit of $ 2.1 billion in 2024 and increased 13 % the previous year. did. The business loss has reached a new high of $ 17.7 billion, which increased last year.
Reality Labs has produced $ 10.1 billion since Meta began to disclose the unit’s financial results.
For the past year, Zuckerberg has focused on promoting progress in the development of smart glasses equipped with rapidly developing AI technology, talking about the creation of a metaares full of Avatar.
In the meta profit call held on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was eager to see the “AI glasses” produced in cooperation with Ray -Ban’s parent company, Esilollukesortica.
“This is a decisive year to decide on hundreds of millions of millions, and ultimately decide whether to be on the way to billions of AI glasses. It’s just a longer crushing,” he said. I did it.
Lightweight glasses include small cameras, microphones, and speakers, so the wearer can take pictures, listen to music, and chat with AI assistants. META is planning to release a new version of smart glasses, which features a small display for the first time in the second half of this year, has reported earlier.
Quest VR headset, which costs more than $ 300 to the latest model, is presumed that analysts and game developers have sold approximately 30 million units so far, so it is difficult to achieve mainstream charm. I am doing it. Zuckerberg stated that the number of people using quest devices and Horizo N operating systems is “growing steadily.”
The ball is a long -term investment of tens of millions of dollars in meta VR and AR, which is not different from other efforts for large companies to refer to the new product category, but are Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine, Amazon Alexa Assistant. I mentioned that it compared with Echo device. Google cloud computing unit.
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He is more than $ 400 billion in Amazon’s Alexa and Apple has more than $ 20 billion for the development of VISION PRO HEADSET, a more expensive rival of Meta quests It is estimated that META’s total investment is $ 850 billion.
“There are a lot of precautions to Zuckerberg’s betting on Reality Labs, but they chose to report it individually,” Ball said Ball. “All competitors make the same investment unless they surface.”
META’s Reality Labs investment is smaller than the “hundreds of millions of dollars” that Zuckerberg is planning to spend “long -term” AI infrastructure. Despite these capital -intensive efforts, the meta remains very profitable thanks to the advantageous online advertising business. Net income increased by 60 % last year to $ 62.4 billion.
