Meta is now a defense contractor • The Register
Meta has partnered with Anduril Industries to build augmented and virtual reality devices for the military, eight years after it fired the defense firm’s founder, Palmer Luckey.
Luckey joined Meta when it was still called Facebook following the social media company’s 2014 acquisition of Oculus, the virtual reality headset biz he founded.
He left the then-Facebook branded corp in 2017, with some reports stating his $10,000 political donation to an anti-Hillary Clinton group in the runup to the 2016 presidential election had been a factor. Others alleged he’d faced pressure to publicly endorse libertarian candidate Gary Johnson instead of his preferred candidate Donald Trump.
A Facebook spokesperson denied that Palmer’s departure was political back in 2018, when the Wall Street Journal made that claim. Whatever the case, Meta’s donation of $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund in December 2024 was by definition political.
The goal of the Meta-Anduril tie-up is to make some money selling XR – extended reality – products, something that has eluded Meta since it adopted the name to signal its focus on monetizing the metaverse and, by some accounts, to distance itself from the brand damage that tarnished Facebook in the wake of various privacy and moderation scandals. XR is a blanket term that encompasses virtual reality (VR), where computer-generated images are projected on the user’s field of vision, blocking out the real world, and augmented reality (AR), where the images are superimposed over the real world.
Meta’s Reality Labs lost $4.2 billion in Q1 2025 and has flushed away similar sums – between $1.83 billion and $4.97 billion – every quarter since Q4 2020 when Reality Labs was formed.
According to the Financial Times, Meta has invested $80 billion in various flavors of reality – virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended – since its 2014 Oculus acquisition, and is expected to spend another $20 billion by the end of 2025.
Perhaps the US military, with a proposed budget that tops $1 trillion this year, will help generate some return on that investment.
“Meta has spent the last decade building AI and AR to enable the computing platform of the future,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, in a statement. “We’re proud to partner with Anduril to help bring these technologies to the American servicemembers that protect our interests at home and abroad.”
The business of head-mounted tech appliances has proven to be a tough one. In 2014, Google gambled that Google Glass would appeal to people with its cyborg-chic and managed to spawn the term Glasshole before the consumer and enterprise versions were cancelled in 2015 and 2023 respectively.
Microsoft’s HoloLens enjoyed a slightly longer market arc, starting in 2015 until it was discontinued in late 2024. And in February, 2025, Redmond handed its US Army Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) contract over to Andruil.
Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro – a “spatial computer” rather than a VR headset – lasted about a year before reportedly being cancelled.
Even so, Google intends to try again with computer-infused eyewear in the form of traditional glasses, with the help of spectacle biz Warby Parker. Apple is said to be developing smart glasses, or gla$$e$ per the company’s preferred margins. And Microsoft at least has thought about smart glasses, having filed relevant patents in 2024.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft perhaps have noted that the face-computing space isn’t entirely moribund: Ray-Ban Meta glasses sold 2 million units from their October 2023 launch through the end of 2024, according to RayBan parent EssilorLuxottica [PDF].
Anduril and Meta anticipate that their tie-up will allow the companies to benefit from their mutual competencies in software, hardware, and artificial intelligence to produce tools that warfighters will find useful.
“The world is entering a new era of computing that will give people access to limitless intelligence and extend their senses and perception in ways that have never been possible before,” said Meta CEO Andrew Bosworth in a statement. “Our national security benefits enormously from American industry bringing these technologies to life.”
The companies expect to deliver mixed reality capabilities through Anduril’s Lattice platform, a command-and-control system that integrates AI to surface real-time battlefield intelligence via AR/VR interfaces. The idea is to put useful data within soldiers’ fields of views to facilitate better decision-making in combat scenarios.
Luckey, for his part, sounds as if he bears no ill-will toward his former employer.
“I am glad to be working with Meta once again,” he said in a statement. “Of all the areas where dual-use technology can make a difference for America, this is the one I am most excited about. My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.” ®
