The competition faces the same wall. Apple, with its Vision Pro augmented reality glasses, is struggling with weak sales and production pauses, while Sony was forced to cut the price of the PSVR2 to 350 euros, 100 less than before and much less than the almost 600 at launch in February 2023. In two years, the Japanese manufacturer sold less than 1.5 million units of this second version of its VR system for PlayStation.
To make this whole scenario worse, the development of the metaverse now faces an invisible enemy: Artificial Intelligence itself. The current AI “gold rush” has created a black hole that absorbs all available hardware. Reports from December 2025 indicate that the price of RAM has skyrocketed by up to 600% in certain markets, with manufacturers diverting all production to AI servers. The situation has reached unusual contours at Samsung, where the Mobile Division reports difficulties in acquiring chips to its own Semiconductor Division, which prefers to sell production capacity to AI giants at premium prices [ler texto ao lado]. With “silicon” at prohibitive prices, creating headsets accessible has become a financial impossibility.
Enter the Avocado project. AND goodbye open-source
The money saved in the metaverse will not remain in the company’s coffers. Meta is massively redirecting these resources to Silicon Valley’s new obsession. The strategy now involves abandoning the open-source philosophy of the Llama model in favor of a new commercial and proprietary model, codenamed Avocado, scheduled for the first quarter of 2026.
To lead this front, the company created the Superintelligence Labs unit, hiring talent from OpenAI and Apple at a premium. The forecast is that Meta will spend around $72 billion on AI this year alone, more than it lost in the metaverse in four years.
In the field of hardwarethe lesson appears to have been learned. The success of Ray-Ban Meta glasses dictated the end of “bricks in the face”: the launch of the Quest 4 was postponed to 2027 and the focus shifts to ultralight devices with external processing, designed under the leadership of Alan Dye, a recently hired former Apple executive.
Wall Street between euphoria and fear
Investor response to this restructuring was volatile. Initially, news of the Metaverse cuts sent Meta shares soaring more than 4%, with Wall Street celebrating the end of an “expensive distraction”. However, sentiment soured this Thursday, December 11, with the market falling around 1% after Oracle reported disappointing results due to AI infrastructure costs.
Investors’ fear is simple and was summed up by analyst Craig Huber, from Huber Research: the change was “smart, but late”. Zuckerberg may therefore have closed the metaverse tap only to open another, equally expensive and uncertain, in Artificial Intelligence, taking into account the strong competition and the delay that his company faces.