Meta Pivots from Metaverse to AI: Cuts Reality Labs Staff and Shutters Horizon Workrooms

In a decisive move that marks the end of an era for its virtual reality ambitions, Meta Platforms has initiated a sweeping restructuring of its hardware division. The company is cutting approximately 10% of its Reality Labs workforce and discontinuing its flagship productivity platform, Horizon Workrooms. This strategic realignment signals a clear pivot from immersive virtual worlds to AI-powered wearables and "superintelligence" research, reflecting the tech giant's aggressive bid to dominate the generative AI landscape in 2026.

The Reality Labs Shake-up: Trimming the VR Dream

Meta has commenced layoffs affecting between 1,000 and 1,500 employees within its Reality Labs division, which houses its VR and AR initiatives. These cuts, representing roughly 10% of the unit's headcount, are distinct from previous efficiency drives; they are a targeted dismantling of the company's "pure" metaverse capabilities in favor of AI integration.

The restructuring has resulted in the immediate closure of several high-profile internal game studios that were once the crown jewels of the Oculus ecosystem. Confirmed closures include:

• Twisted Pixel: Known for Wilson's Heart and Path of the Warrior.
• Sanzaru Games: The developers behind the high-budget, critically acclaimed Asgard's Wrath series.
• Armature Studio: Creators of the Resident Evil 4 VR port.

Additionally, Supernatural, the $400 million fitness app acquisition, has reportedly been moved into "maintenance mode" with a skeleton crew, effectively halting active development.

This contraction comes as Reality Labs continues to hemorrhage capital, having accumulated losses exceeding $70 billion since late 2020. In 2024 alone, the division posted an operating loss of $17.7 billion. With shareholder patience wearing thin and the AI arms race accelerating, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew Bosworth have opted to staunch the bleeding in VR to fuel the capital-intensive battle for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The End of the "Office Metaverse"

Perhaps the most symbolic casualty of this pivot is Horizon Workrooms, Meta's virtual collaboration platform. Once heralded as the future of remote work—where avatars would convene in digital boardrooms—the app will be discontinued as a standalone service on February 16, 2026.

The shutdown effectively kills the "VR for Enterprise" dream that Meta championed during the pandemic. The details of the sunsetting process are stark:

• Service Termination: Access to Horizon Workrooms ends on Feb 16, 2026. All user data, including whiteboards and room layouts, will be permanently deleted.
• Hardware Shift: Meta is halting sales of its commercial Quest SKUs and managed services effective February 20, 2026.
• Enterprise Retreat: Existing business customers will receive free licenses for the remaining service period, but the message is unambiguous: Meta is exiting the enterprise VR hardware market.

This retreat suggests that the vision of wearing bulky headsets for daily meetings failed to gain traction against friction-free video conferencing tools, leading Meta to abandon the B2B VR sector entirely.

The New Frontier: Ambient AI and Smart Wearables

While the "Metaverse" retreats, Meta's investment in AI is reaching unprecedented levels. The resources freed from Reality Labs are being aggressively reallocated to a new "Wearables" focus and the company's protected Superintelligence Labs.

The new strategy centers on ambient computing—AI that assists users through lightweight, non-intrusive hardware rather than immersive isolation. The primary vehicle for this vision is the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which have seen unexpected consumer success with over 2 million units sold. Meta aims to ramp production to 20 million units by the end of 2026, positioning the glasses as the ultimate "eyes and ears" for its Llama-based AI models.

Key pillars of the 2026 AI Strategy include:

• Infrastructure Investment: A projected CAPEX of $70 billion to $100 billion for 2026, dedicated almost exclusively to AI compute clusters and data centers.
• Hardware Form Factor: Moving away from the Quest headset as a general-purpose device toward lightweight smart glasses that serve as a vessel for an always-on AI assistant.
• Superintelligence: A concentrated R&D push to achieve human-level AI capabilities, protected from the broader layoffs affecting the hardware teams.

Strategic Comparison: 2021 vs. 2026

The following table outlines the fundamental shift in Meta's operational philosophy over the last five years.

Meta's Strategic Pivot: A Comparison

Strategy Aspect	The Metaverse Era (2021-2024)	The AI & Wearables Era (2026-Future)
Core Goal	Immersing users in a 3D virtual world	Augmenting reality with ambient AI intelligence
Primary Hardware	VR Headsets (Quest Pro, Quest 3)	Smart Glasses (Ray-Ban Meta, Orion)
Key Application	Virtual Meetings (Horizon Workrooms)	AI Assistants (Meta AI, multimodal sensing)
Enterprise Strategy	B2B VR Hardware & Software Sales	Consumer-first AI adoption; B2B exit
Investment Focus	Reality Labs Operating Costs	GPU Clusters & Model Training
Success Metric	Time spent in VR	Daily Active AI Interactions

Why This Matters for the AI Industry

From the perspective of Creati.ai, Meta's restructuring is a validation of the "AI-first" hardware thesis. The industry is moving away from the idea that users want to escape reality and toward the concept that users want assistance within reality.

By cutting the dead weight of low-adoption VR projects, Meta is streamlining its organization to compete directly with Google and OpenAI. The "Superintelligence Labs" will likely benefit most from this consolidation, gaining both talent and compute resources. For AI developers and creators, this signals that the Meta ecosystem will increasingly revolve around Llama integration and multimodal input (vision and voice) via wearables, rather than 3D asset creation for virtual worlds.

Mark Zuckerberg's bet has shifted from building a new digital universe to building the smartest entity within this one. While the Metaverse may be dormant, the race for the ultimate AI companion has just hit top speed.