Meta spent $4.3 billion on its VR division in three months, and made *checks figures* $440 million in return

VR is sometimes dismissed as a fad, with some seemingly desperate to ring the death knell on virtual reality and its associated hardware at the earliest opportunity. While we're not so convinced, the latest financial report from Meta shows staggering expenses in regards to its VR headset and augmented reality division that are difficult to ignore.

Meta's first quarter results of 2024 reveal that Reality Labs, the company's business and research unit that develops and produces VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3, made $440 million, a 30% increase attributed to Quest headset sales. Reality Labs' expenses, however, were an eye-watering $4.3 billion.

This was actually down 1% year-over-year, as «higher headcount related expenses were more than offset by lapping inventory related valuation adjustments and restructuring costs.»

Still, that leaves Reality Labs with an operating loss of $3.8 billion, which is hardly the sort of small change you wouldn't mind losing down the back of the sofa.

Those of you with a good memory will also remember that this isn't the first time Meta's Reality Labs has suffered financially, as last year it was reported that it spent $4.279 billion in the last financial quarter of 2022. 

Despite owning a VR division that seems to be bleeding money, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently vowed to increase spending overall at Meta to turn it into «the leading AI company in the world» (via The Financial Times), which seems to have spooked investors and caused a 12% loss in share value in wake of his statements.

Financial woes indeed then, although its not like Meta has been shown to be particularly careful with its pocketbook recently. Aside from its VR losses, the company has been investing in AI-crunching hardware like the Nvidia H100 GPU en masse in order to train its language models, and current estimates indicate that this substantial investment could add up to $7 billion worth of the immensely powerful Nvidia chips by the end of the year.

Sign up