83.5 billion dollars lost: Meta buries the metaverse and bets everything on AI

In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta to signal to the world that the future of his company lay in the metaverse. Four and a half years later, the results of the first quarter of 2026 tell a completely different story. Reality Labs, the division responsible for building this virtual future, lost 4.03 billion dollars for 402 million in revenue. According to the document filed with the SEC, cumulative losses from the division now reach 83.5 billion dollars since 2021. Twenty-one quarters, averaging four billion dollars per quarter, with none being profitable.

How is Meta spending so much without gaining anything?

To put this figure into perspective, 83.5 billion dollars is more than the annual GDP of Luxembourg, Kenya, or Bulgaria. It is also more than three times the combined annual budget of the CNRS, INSERM, and CEA. Reality Labs has spent this money on Quest headsets, the Horizon Worlds platform, and research into augmented reality. Added to this are the connected Ray-Ban glasses developed with EssilorLuxottica.

The problem is not that Meta is losing money on a risky bet. Dozens of tech companies do that. The problem is the sequence of the last three months. In January 2026, Meta laid off 10 to 15% of Reality Labs' workforce. In March, the Horizon Worlds virtual platform shut down on Quest headsets and retreated to mobile. And on April 29, during the earnings report, Zuckerberg devoted only one sentence to the metaverse. His stated priority: artificial intelligence, and more specifically "personal superintelligence," without specifying exactly what it entails.

The company, however, is doing very well.56.3 billion dollars in revenue for the first quarter (+33% year-over-year), 22.9 billion dollars in operating income. The net profit jumps by 61% to $26.8 billion, but this figure merits an asterisk. It includes an exceptional tax benefit of 8.03 billion dollars linked to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Without this effect, the earnings per share would have been $3.13 lower. Facebook's advertising machine, Instagram, and WhatsApp therefore fund both Reality Labs' losses and Zuckerberg's new obsession.

Why expenses explode at the moment when memory is burning

This obsession has a cost. Meta has raised its 2026 investment spending forecasts to 125-145 billion dollars, up from 115-135 billion announced three months earlier. In 2025, the company spent $72.2 billion. The doubling in a year is due to two factors. First, the rise in memory component prices. Second, the construction of data centers designed to train AI models (Spark Muse being the latest example) and the in-house silicon developed with Broadcom.

Susan Li, the company's CFO, clarified during the analyst conference that the costs came from three areas. Infrastructure amortization, third-party cloud, and hiring AI engineers. Meta hired heavily in 2025, bringing its workforce to 77,986 people, while cutting positions in VR. The message is clear: every dollar withdrawn from the metaverse is reinjected into artificial intelligence.

For us, the pivot translates concretely into an absence. The Ray-Ban Display, the new connected glasses with an integrated screen developed with EssilorLuxottica, were supposed to arrive in France early 2026. The Franco-Italian group generates 25.4 billion euros in revenue. The launch was postponed indefinitely, officially due to insufficient stock in the United States. Article 50 of the AI Act, applicable in August 2026, requires transparency on interactions with AI and labeling synthetic content. Which complicates the European timeline even further. Paradox of the moment: it's a French partner that manufactures the product France cannot buy.

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