Meta continues to hemorrhage billions of dollars in its pursuit of developing the metaverse as a business, with yet another quarter resulting in heavy losses. According to Meta’s financial report for Q1 2025, its Reality Labs segment suffered from a whopping $4.2 billion income loss from operations during a period that brought in just $412 million in revenue.
The Facebook founding tech giant says that its Reality Labs segment includes “virtual, augmented, and mixed reality related consumer hardware, software, and content.” Think Meta Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses (which I’ll get to later).
While such huge losses might seem problematic, this isn't at all surprising. Meta co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has long sunk billions into the metaverse, even at the chagrin of investors. And indeed, CNBC has reported on the Reality Lab’s quarterly losses since 2020, when Meta first recognised it as its own segment, and the data is startling. Losses peaked in Q4 2024 at $4.9 billion, and were lowest in Q1 2021 at $1.83 billion; every other quarter since Q4 2020 has suffered a loss of somewhere in between.
It’s no secret that virtual reality is a difficult business to monetize, with Apple’s Vision Pro hardly setting the tech world alight. But if there’s any indication of a turn in the tide, Meta has at least seen a significant rise in Ray-Ban Meta sales.
Mobile World Live stated that Meta CFO Susan Li revealed on an earnings call that a decline in Quest headset sales had impacted the segment's losses, but this was bolstered by an increase in Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, which enjoyed “more than four-times as many monthly actives as Q1 2024.”
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