Meta’s grand metaverse dream is looking more like a financial nightmare, and the company is openly admitting the pain isn’t stopping anytime soon.

Reality Labs, the division that was supposed to drag us all into a brave new virtual world, managed to lose about $19.1 billion last year. That’s even worse than the roughly $17.7 billion it lost the year before. The “future of computing” is, for now, the future of red ink.

The scale of the mismatch is staggering. Reality Labs brought in just $955 million in sales in the fourth quarter and about $2.2 billion for the entire year. Meta is effectively spending nearly nine dollars for every single dollar it earns from VR headsets, mixed‑reality devices, and metaverse software. For a company that built its empire on cheap, high‑margin ads, this is a brutal contrast.

And the financial carnage isn’t happening in a vacuum. Earlier this month, Meta slashed around 10 percent of Reality Labs’ staff, reportedly hitting as many as 1,000 employees. Several VR studios are being shut down, and products are being quietly killed off, including the Workrooms app that was once hyped as the future of virtual meetings. The “office of tomorrow” is now just another discontinued experiment.

Yet, despite the mounting losses, closures, and layoffs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still doubling down in public. On the company’s earnings call, he insisted Meta is simply “shifting” its Reality Labs investment, now focusing more on glasses and wearables. At the same time, he wants to turn the Horizon platform into a mainstream mobile experience and, somehow, eventually transform VR into a “profitable ecosystem.” For now, that phrase sounds more like wishful branding than business reality.

Zuckerberg admitted that Reality Labs’ losses this year are expected to be similar to last year’s, calling this period a likely peak before spending slowly comes down. Translation: investors should brace for more years of heavy losses before Meta can even begin to prove that its metaverse obsession wasn’t a colossal miscalculation.

It’s a far cry from the swagger of 2021, when Facebook rebranded as Meta and loudly declared that the metaverse was the next big thing. From the start, critics questioned whether anyone actually wanted to live, work, and socialize in cartoonish virtual worlds. Early demos of Horizon Worlds were widely mocked, and Meta’s VR avatars became an internet punchline. Nearly five years later, the skepticism hasn’t faded; if anything, it’s been vindicated.

Adding to the confusion, Meta is now pouring far more energy and money into artificial intelligence than into virtual reality. The company that once said the metaverse was its future is suddenly acting like AI is the real prize. The result: a VR division that looks stranded, expensive, and strategically sidelined.

With Reality Labs burning cash, studios shutting down, products being scrapped, and the spotlight shifting to AI, Meta’s VR future looks increasingly shaky. The company insists it is building the next computing platform. Right now, what it is clearly building,year after year,is losses.