Meta Reportedly Cutting About 1,500 VR and AR Jobs Amid Renewed Push to Become an AI Juggernaut

According to an anonymously-sourced New York Times article, as early as Tuesday Meta will announce that about 10% of the workers in the company’s Reality Labs division are set to lose their jobs—about 1,500 people in a division of about 15,000.

Reality Labs was once Oculus, the VR headset company founded by Palmer Luckey, originally funded through a Kickstarter campaign. Since being acquired in 2014 by what was at the time called Facebook, Oculus has evolved into the “virtual and augmented realityâ€-focused division of Meta. It makes headsets and the Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses along with VR and AR software, including the Horizon Worlds social networking platform—what’s left of it, anyway.

The Times says Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has called for a meeting of Reality Labs staff members on Wednesday that he has deemed the “most important†meeting of the year, and indicated that employees are meant to attend in person. From the sound of it, this meeting will be held the day after the layoff plan is officially made public.

My Gizmodo colleague James Pero strongly implied last month that something like this was coming, noting that a planned 30% budget cut at Reality Labs was, if not the death knell for the metaverse project at Meta, then a least a clear shift in priorities to AI.

And indeed, on Monday Meta announced a massive buildout plan for data center capacity called Meta Compute, aimed at building “tens of gigawatts†of AI compute before the end of the 2020s. Compute buildout is somewhat crudely measured in gigawatts—roughly the power usage of a major U.S. city. So Meta’s rather vague “tens of gigawatts†of compute projection translates to “enough data centers to use more than ten San Franciscos’ worth of electricity, but less than one hundred San Franciscos.â€

Also on Monday, Meta announced something sure to help smooth over the friction involved in all this AI data center construction: the hiring of Dina Powell McCormick—a former advisor to Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, who has also worked as a banking executive—to be Meta’s new president and vice chairperson.

“How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage,†CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a statement.

Zuckerberg also used the term “strategic advantage†in 2022 to explain his push for more metaverse-related technology. “Enabling more experiences is really the primary driver and then the sort of fortification against external risks is certainly a strategic advantage over the long-term,†he said at the time.