The wreckage is expensive, but Meta is moving on. Horizon Worlds is being shut down on VR platforms — off the Quest store in March, fully offline in VR by June 15 — ending Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse project after close to $80 billion in losses. As the metaverse era ends, the AI era at Meta officially begins.
The metaverse era was launched with theater and ambition. Zuckerberg’s 2021 rebrand event was visually spectacular and philosophically detailed — a product reveal dressed as a manifesto. He described not a product but a paradigm: a new way of existing digitally that would eventually touch billions of people and reshape global commerce, creativity, and communication. Meta would build the infrastructure of that paradigm.
Building the infrastructure proved easier than building the audience. Horizon Worlds offered virtual environments, social tools, and creative features — but it could not build the user base that turns infrastructure into a platform. Monthly active users reportedly stayed in the hundreds of thousands, and without a critical mass of participants, the social promise of the metaverse could not be fulfilled. The world Zuckerberg imagined remained mostly empty.
Reality Labs tallied close to $80 billion in losses as it sustained the effort through years of disappointing results. The formal pivot came in early 2025, when layoffs of more than 1,000 Reality Labs employees were accompanied by a public shift in Meta’s strategic focus toward AI. The company that named itself after the metaverse is now defining itself around artificial intelligence.
The AI era begins with different dynamics than the metaverse era did. AI is already embedded in everyday life, already generating commercial returns, and already the subject of intense competition among the world’s most powerful technology companies. Zuckerberg enters this competition with the experience of the metaverse behind him — chastened, perhaps, but also experienced in what it means to invest seriously in an emerging technology. Whether AI will vindicate the approach the metaverse could not is the question that defines Meta’s next decade.
