Under the new trend of accelerating hardware innovation driven by artificial intelligence (AI), Meta, a US company, is planning to reduce its metaverse business and shift towards investing in AI hardware. Meta recently announced that it is considering reducing the budget of its metaverse business team by 30% next year and intends to acquire an AI wearable device startup. Meta's strategic shift is driven by the pressure of sustained losses in its metaverse business, highlighting its urgent intention to balance long-term vision and short-term benefits in the AI wave, and seek new growth poles. On the one hand, the metaverse business burns money like running water. The metaverse business "Reality Lab", which was once regarded by Meta as the future direction, has suffered continuous losses of over $70 billion in the past four years and has yet to truly open up market space. To this day, the metaverse continues to face challenges such as lower than expected technological maturity, insufficient user interest, and uncertain commercial prospects. In response to Meta's budget cuts for the metaverse, the market has responded positively, and Meta's stock price has recently risen by over 3%, which indirectly reflects investors' concerns about the continued losses of the metaverse. The metaverse has not withdrawn, but has gradually returned from conceptual hype to rational development. The metaverse still holds value as a long-term technological vision, and the development of generative AI is accelerating the construction of metaverse content. However, a grand vision requires sustained phased achievements as support. At this stage, focusing limited resources on AI hardware with greater certainty and potential for returns is undoubtedly a more cautious and pragmatic choice for Meta. On the other hand, the trend of AI hardware innovation is booming. Meta's AI glasses continue to sell well, capturing 73% of the market share in the first half of this year and increasing shipments by over 200% year-on-year, becoming a new growth engine. Meta recently stated in a statement: "Given the company's positive progress in AI glasses and wearable devices, we are shifting some of our investments from the metaverse towards this direction. ”Its strategic focus is accelerating its shift towards the AI hardware field, not only by poaching top talent from companies such as Apple and Google and acquiring AI companies, but also by committing to investing the majority of this year's $72 billion capital expenditure into AI infrastructure. Nowadays, AI is accelerating towards the application layer, and the competition for a "new entrance" to integrate AI is becoming increasingly fierce. Alibaba released the first Quark AI glasses. ByteDance joined ZTE to "test" AI phones. Google will launch AI glasses next year, and the Open Artificial Intelligence Research Center (OpenAI) of the United States is promoting the strategic layout of hardware... Recently, many technology giants have stepped up the deployment of AI hardware, and AI glasses and AI phones have become key directions. It can be foreseen that competition around AI hardware will become even more intense in 2026. However, as AI hardware ignites a wave of innovation, we also need to be wary of repeating the mistakes of concept hype. The transition of AI from product testing to mature industries is actually just beginning. There are many AI products on the market that are labeled as "disruptive", which initially impress people but then basically disappear. This also indicates that no matter how technology iterates or how trends flow, the trend of technology must never deviate from commercial value. (New Society)