Meta is preparing another round of job cuts — this time aimed squarely at the division that once embodied Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s boldest bet on the future of the internet.

The company plans to eliminate roughly 10 percent of its Reality Labs workforce, according to people familiar with the discussions, trimming thousands of jobs tied to virtual reality headsets and a metaverse-focused social network, The New York Times reports.

 The layoffs, expected to be announced this week, would mark a significant slowdown for Meta’s long-running push to build immersive virtual worlds — even as the company accelerates spending on artificial intelligence.

Reality Labs employs about 15,000 people, making the cuts relatively small compared with Meta’s overall workforce of roughly 78,000.

But the impact inside the division is expected to be substantial, with some teams losing more than one in 10 workers, one person said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal decisions.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer and the executive who oversees Reality Labs, has called a companywide meeting for Wednesday and urged employees to attend in person, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times. Bosworth described it as the “most important” meeting of the year, without providing further details.

The planned cuts underscore how sharply Meta’s priorities have shifted.

Just a few years ago, Zuckerberg was betting that virtual reality would become the next major computing platform, transforming everything from social media to work and entertainment.

That vision drove Meta’s 2021 rebranding and years of heavy spending on headsets, software and developer tools.

But consumer enthusiasm has been limited. Despite repeated hardware releases and billions of dollars in investment, Meta’s virtual reality headsets remain a niche product.

Reality Labs has posted losses in the tens of billions since its creation, fueling investor skepticism about how long Meta could afford to chase the metaverse dream.

At the same time, the company faces intense competition in artificial intelligence from rivals including OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.

Zuckerberg has responded by pouring money into A.I., slashing budgets elsewhere and urging executives to rein in spending for 2026.

Meta expects to invest tens of billions of dollars in new data centers to power its A.I. ambitions and has offered eye-popping compensation packages to recruit top researchers.

Much of that work is being driven by Meta’s secretive “TBD Lab,” a skunk works unit focused on developing what Zuckerberg has described as superintelligence — a system that could one day rival or surpass human cognition.

As part of the shift, Meta plans to reallocate funding away from some virtual reality efforts and toward its wearables division, which builds smart glasses and wristband-based computing devices.

Those products are increasingly central to Zuckerberg’s vision for how A.I. will be woven into everyday life.

Not all of Reality Labs will feel the pain equally.

Employees working on augmented reality hardware, including smart glasses and wrist-worn controllers, are expected to be largely spared from the layoffs, according to two people familiar with the plans.

That group has produced one of Meta’s rare recent hardware successes: Ray-Ban smart glasses equipped with a camera and built-in A.I. assistant, which the company says have sold more than two million units.

Meta has also showcased a more advanced version, the Ray-Ban Display glasses, which include digital menus visible inside the lenses and are controlled through subtle hand and wrist gestures.

At a major technology conference in Las Vegas last week, Meta said it was delaying the international rollout of the device, citing limited supply and unexpectedly strong demand.

On an earnings call last summer, Zuckerberg described smart glasses as “the main way that we integrate superintelligence into our day-to-day lives,” signaling where he believes the next consumer computing breakthrough lies.

Meta declined to comment on the planned layoffs. In December, a company spokeswoman said Meta was “shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward A.I. glasses” and was not planning broader organizational changes.

For now, Meta insists it is not abandoning the metaverse entirely. But the cuts suggest a quieter reality: virtual worlds may still have a future at Meta — just not the starring role they once did.