Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL) is assembling a dedicated hardware team, separate from its existing Reality Labs division, as the company expands its ambitions in artificial intelligence-powered devices.
According to a report by Business Insider, the effort has seen some engineers from Reality Labs, the division behind Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses and Quest virtual reality headsets, transition to MSL to prototype the AI division’s software on existing Reality Labs hardware. The two departments are expected to continue working closely together, though the new team will operate independently.
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To lead the hardware effort at MSL, Meta is hiring Rui Xu, a veteran engineer who most recently headed hardware at Dreamer, an AI agent startup whose founding team Meta acqui-hired last month. Before Dreamer, Xu served as chief operating officer of K-Scale, a robotics startup that closed down last year. He has also held roles at ByteDance, where he led a smart devices lab that reportedly shipped millions of units in China, and has management experience at Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Tencent.
MSL is led by Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta after the company acquired his startup Scale AI for $14.5 billion. In a podcast appearance, Wang said Meta wants to build a “constellation” of devices that can host a personalised AI agent, one that is “always on” and can see and hear what its user does. The nature of the hardware devices the new team will develop has not been disclosed.
Meta’s Ray-Ban AI smart glasses, developed by Reality Labs, have sold over 7 million units to date and is the company’s most commercially successful hardware product so far. The new MSL hardware effort appears to be aimed at building devices beyond the smart glasses and headset categories, though specifics remain unclear.
The move comes as several major technology companies compete to develop AI-native personal devices. OpenAI is working on a hardware product being designed by Jony Ive, the former Apple chief designer. Apple is said to be developing its own smart glasses and London-based Nothing is reportedly exploring similar products.
Alongside its hardware efforts, Meta has also announced a new top-level infrastructure initiative called Meta Compute earlier this year, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg stating the company plans to build “tens of gigawatts” of compute capacity this decade. Daniel Gross, former chief executive of Safe Superintelligence, has been brought in to lead long-term capacity planning for the effort, while Dina Powell McCormick, who recently joined as president and vice chairman, will handle partnerships with governments and sovereign entities on infrastructure financing and deployment.
Years of significant losses at Reality Labs have accumulated nearly $80 billion since 2020, including over $6 billion in the final quarter of 2025 alone. The division was central to Meta’s earlier bet on the metaverse, a vision that CEO Zuckerberg outlined when he renamed Facebook to Meta in 2021. Last month, Zuckerberg pulled the plug on metaverse, announcing that Horizon Worlds, the flagship virtual reality social platform will be dismantled from VR by June 15 and that Meta has officially shuttered the metaverse project.
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