Record Data Sheet
Meta pulls in more than $100 billion a year from its core apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. That business prints money. And yet, since 2020, a single division within the company has burned through $83.6 billion without ever turning a profit.
Where this number comes from
Reality Labs is what Meta calls its bet on virtual and augmented reality: the Quest headsets, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and the project that got Zuckerberg to rename the entire company back in 2021. Ever since Meta started breaking this division out separately in its financial filings at the end of 2020, its quarterly reports to the SEC have shown an operating loss every single year, and a bigger one each time.
Add up those six annual losses, straight from Meta’s own 10-K filings, and you get $83.6 billion. In 2025 alone, the division lost $19.19 billion on just $2.21 billion in revenue. Put another way, for every dollar Reality Labs brought in during 2025, it spent almost nine.
Why Meta keeps funding this
The short answer is that it can afford to. Meta’s advertising business, grouped under “Family of Apps,” posted an operating profit of $102.469 billion in 2025, according to its annualreport. That business alone easily covers what Reality Labs loses, and Meta still walked away with $83.276 billion in total operating profit for the year after accounting for every dollar the VR division burned.
Zuckerberg has framed this as a long game. During the January 2026 earnings call, he said he expected 2026 losses to land around the same level as 2025, and that this would likely mark the peak before losses start coming down. In the meantime, Meta has been shifting a growing share of the division’s budget away from VR headsets and toward AI powered glasses, following the surprise commercial success of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
Meanwhile, what is everyone else doing?
No other major tech company has bet this big, or been this open about what it costs them. It’s worth separating what companies actually confirm from what analyst firms like IDC or Counterpoint merely estimate, because those are two very different things.
Apple launched the Vision Pro in February 2024 at an official price of $3,499, confirmed directly by Apple. What Apple has never done is disclose how many units it has sold. There is no official sales figure for Vision Pro anywhere in the company’s SEC filings. Estimates from IDC, roughly 390,000 units in 2024 falling to around 85,000 in 2025, are just that: outside analyst estimates, not numbers Apple has confirmed.
Samsung entered this market in October 2025 with the Galaxy XR, officially priced at $1,799, built alongside Google (which supplies the Android XR operating system) and Qualcomm (the chip). Samsung hasn’t published official sales figures for the device either.
Sony doesn’t even break out PSVR2 as its own segment in its financial results. It gets folded into the broader PlayStation business, so there’s no official profit or loss figure specific to Sony’s VR hardware.
Here’s the part that actually stands out: Meta is the only major tech company that publicly breaks down, quarter after quarter, exactly what its bet on virtual and augmented reality costs. Apple doesn’t. Samsung doesn’t. Sony doesn’t. That means the $83.6 billion figure has nothing to compare itself against. Someone else might be losing similar amounts. There’s just no way to know it with the same certainty we have about Meta.
Frequently asked questions
How much did Reality Labs lose in 2025 alone? $19.193 billion, against revenue of $2.207 billion, according to Meta Platforms’ Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025, filed with the SEC.
How much revenue does Reality Labs bring in each year? Very little compared to what it loses: $2.207 billion in 2025, per the same filing. Meta’s advertising business, by contrast,generated more than $100 billion in operating profit alone that same year.
Since when has Meta reported Reality Labs losses separately? Since the fourth quarter of 2020, when the company, still called Facebook, Inc. at the time, first began breaking the division out as its own reportable segment.
Has Meta said when Reality Labs might stop losing money? Not with a specific date. During the January 2026 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expected 2026 losses to be similar to 2025’s, and that this would likely be the peak before losses start to decline.
How much does the rest of Meta’s business make? $102.469 billion in operating profit in 2025 from its “Family of Apps” segment alone (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger), up 18% from the year before, according to its annual report.
Has Meta cut spending on Reality Labs? Yes. In early 2026 it laid off more than 1,000 employees from the division and shut down several internal content studios for Quest, shifting resources toward AI hardware like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses instead.
Do Apple or Samsung disclose how much they lose on their headsets? No. Neither company has published an official profit or loss figure for Vision Pro or Galaxy XR. Meta remains the only major player that reports this kind of detail.