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Meta’s metaverse-building Reality Labs operating losses last year rose 10% to $17.7 billion, taking its total losses since 2020 to over $60 billion.
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Reality Labs, the research arm of social media giant Meta Platforms, bled even more billions over the last quarter, but Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg says 2025 is the year for the metaverse.
Meta’s fourth-quarter and full-year results for 2024, shared on Jan. 29, show Reality Labs’ Q4 operating losses hit $4.97 billion, while it brought in just over $1 billion in revenue.
Its full-year 2024 revenue jumped 13% year-on-year to $2.15 billion while operating losses rose 10% to $17.73 billion. Reality Labs has now lost over $60 billion since 2020.
“This is also going to be a pivotal year for the metaverse,” Zuckerberg told investors on an earnings call, adding that the number of users for its augmented reality hardware and metaverse “has been steadily growing.”
“This is a year when a number of the long-term investments that we’ve been working on, that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring, will really start to land.”
Reality Labs is Meta’s division focused on making its virtual and augmented reality tech, such as its line of Quest VR headsets and its Horizon metaverse, but it has also become increasingly intertwined with the firm’s artificial intelligence initiatives.
Reality Labs losses since 2022. Source: Yahoo Finance
In a post on Facebook last week, Zuckerberg said that 2025 “will be a defining year for AI.”
He announced on an earnings call that Meta is planning to spend $60 billion to $65 billion on its AI strategy with plans to build a 2 gigawatt datacenter “that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”
Zuckerberg said that agentic AI, or AI assistants, will reach more than a billion people this year.
“I expect that this is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,”
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Zuckerberg also praised the Trump administration, saying it will prioritize “American technology winning” and will “defend our values and interests abroad.”
Meta’s Q4 2024 revenues grew 21% from the same quarter a year ago to $48.4 billion, topping analyst estimates by more than a billion dollars, with the lion’s share coming from advertising.
Its full-year 2024 revenues jumped 22% to $164.5 billion.
Investors responded positively, with Meta’s stock gaining 5% during the earnings call after closing flat on Jan. 29 at $676.5, according to Google Finance.
Meta closed after-hours trading up 2.3% to $692. Its stock is up more than 15% so far this year.
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This article first appeared at Cointelegraph.com News
