Zuckerberg shuts down Metaverse project after $80 billion loss

Meta CEO and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is shutting down one of the company’s largest and most expensive projects — the Horizon Worlds metaverse — whose cumulative losses have reached $80 billion.

Support for the VR platform on Quest devices will end by mid-June, and the application will be removed from the store as early as the end of March, according to foreign media reports.

The project was launched in 2021 after Facebook rebranded as Meta and was a key bet on the 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: Horizon Worlds’ audience did not exceed several hundred thousand monthly active users.

The company’s metaverse division, Reality Labs, spent vast sums without a clear path to profitability. This year, Meta began winding down the direction — in January, 1,500 Reality Labs employees were laid off, several internal VR studios were closed, the VR division’s budget was cut by 30%, and the VR fitness service Supernatural (acquired for $400 million) stopped producing content. The company says it is not abandoning virtual reality entirely and will continue developing VR devices, including smart glasses.

Zuckerberg now has new priorities. Following the emergence of the artificial intelligence project ChatGPT in 2022, Meta has reallocated resources and is focusing on AI. In 2025, Meta invested more than $60 billion in building data centres and infrastructure. AI-related spending this year could reach up to $135 billion.

By Tamilla Hasanova