This amount is equivalent to Latvia's GDP for 2 years.
Meta corporation owner and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is shutting down one of the largest and most costly projects in the company's history — the Horizon Worlds metaverse, which has accumulated losses of $80 billion. Support for the VR platform on Quest devices will cease by mid-June, and the app will disappear from the store by the end of March.
The project was launched in 2021 after Facebook rebranded to Meta and was a key bet on the new future of the internet. It was expected that the metaverse would become a new social environment where users would interact through virtual reality devices. However, expectations were not met: the audience of Horizon Worlds did not exceed several hundred thousand active users per month.
The company's metaverse division, Reality Labs, was spending enormous amounts without hope of turning a profit. This year, Meta began to scale back the direction — in January, 1,500 Reality Labs employees were laid off, several internal VR studios were closed, the budget for VR divisions was cut by 30%, and the VR fitness service Supernatural (acquired for $400 million) stopped producing content. The company states that it is not completely abandoning virtual reality and will continue to develop VR devices, including smart glasses.
Zuckerberg has new priorities. After the emergence of the artificial intelligence project ChatGPT in 2022, Meta reallocated resources and is betting on AI. In 2025, Meta directed over $60 billion towards building data centers and infrastructure. Costs related to AI this year could reach up to $135 billion.
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